ANGELA ELLSWORTH

Born 1964 in Palo Alto, USA. Lives and works in Phoenix, USA.

Angela Ellsworth, Seer Bonnet IV, 2009, 19,872 pearl corsage pins and fabric, 83.8 x 27.9 x 38.1 cm. Courtesy the artist and Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale. Photograph: Ana Elizalde

Angela Ellsworth is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. Her drawings, paintings, installations and performances explore the body in its various contexts and constraints – the moving and performing body; the body subject to social and religious conventions, as well as to the physical acts of artmaking. Following her initial studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Ellsworth lived for several years in Florence, Italy before returning to the United States to complete an MF A in Painting and Performance Art at Rutgers State University of New Jersey in 1993. Her works of this time were large, figurative canvases that she has moved away from in recent years in her exploration of public art, feminism and performance. Aiming to connect the body with art, and public with private experience, her solo and collaborative artworks and performances have taken in such wide-ranging subjects as physical fitness, endurance, social ritual, religious tradition and performance art history.

In her varied practice, Ellsworth has recreated a gym within an art museum to explore the two institutions’ shared obsessions with beauty and aspiration (Club Extra, 2000), has hosted a life-drawing class within a gallery in which the model and triathlon athlete Christopher Bergland ran for two and a half hours on a treadmill (Drawing on Breath, 2003), and has done a series of performative drawing pieces, such as her ongoing ‘Love Circles’, where she and her partner meet after walking opposite half-circles of a route drawn on to a map. Her sculptures have included Wall Ticklers (2001) – small abstract appendages made of pearl-tipped corsage pins protruding rudely from gallery walls, and playful balls made from looping hundreds of colourful belts around each other (Belt Ball series, 1993–2003).

Ellsworth’s recent sculptural works have been informed by her own Mormon background, taking the outward appearance of members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints as their point of departure. Ellsworth’s use of corsage pins in her work to emphasise a sharp-ended side to beauty is seen in her recent series of sculptural bonnets. Made of fabric with a pearl-encrusted exterior comprising thousands of pins, the insides of the traditional pioneer headpieces are needle edged and present a painful proposition to the wearer. These bonnets have been shown alongside a series of works where scenes from seminal performance pieces have been embroidered on to paper napkins. Referencing the Mormon practice of polygamy, Ellsworth claims these important figures of performance practice as her ‘sister wives’; in Sister Wife Valie (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969) (2008), tiny stitches recreate the 1969 event in which Austrian artist Valie Export brandished a machine gun while wearing crotchless jeans. For the opening of the exhibition in which the aforementioned works were shown, the artist arranged for young women in long pastel dresses to pantomime the scenes depicted on the napkins; one woman shone a torch between her legs in reference to Annie Sprinkle’s 1989 performance Public Cervix Announcement. Together, the suite of works examines art, religion and tradition, colliding old-fashioned domesticity with some of the more radical artworks of the last century.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2010 ‘New Works’, Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
2010 ‘Training’, Central Utah Art Center, Ephraim, Utah, USA
2009 ‘Underpinnings’, Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
2005 ‘New Works’, Bentley Gallery, Phoenix, Arizona, USA
2000 ‘Club Extra’, Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe, Arizona, USA

Selected Group Exhibitions

2011 ‘Extreme Materials 2’, Memorial Art Gallery, New York, USA
2009 ‘The Beautiful Game’, Hannah Maclure Centre, Dundee, Scotland
2008 ‘National Review of Live Art: Depicting Action’, Glasgow, Scotland
2007 ‘Drawing Outside the Lines’, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona, USA
2006 ‘Hysteria Deluxe’, Angles Gallery, Santa Monica, California, USA

Selected Bibliography

Jennie Klein, ‘Intervene! Interrupt! Rethinking Art as Social Practice’, Art Papers, July–August 2008, pp. 18–21
Petra Kuppers, ‘Living Bodies: Staging Knowledge, Fantasy, and Temporality’, The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2007, pp. 66–73
Deborah Sussman Susser, ‘PICKS: Angela Ellsworth’, Artforum, 20 January 2009: www.artforum.com
Kathleen Vanesian, ‘Bitches in Stitches’, Phoenix New Times, 22–28 January 2009, p. 34
Lori Waxman, ‘Upside Down and Inside Out’, Feminist Art Then & Now, exhibition catalogue, St. John’s University, Queens, 2007, pp. 7, 19