Cecelia Condit Retrospective @ Inova

“Death is the most interesting thing we do in life…” says Annie Lloyd at 90 years old in the film by the same name, Annie Lloyd (2010). Cecelia Condit generated the installation that shows the last vestiges to the aging process from a daughter's eyes, a mother-daughter legacy that Condit often portrays in all her video work. The current retrospective at the Institute of Visual Arts (Inova) titled “Cecelia Condit: 1981- Present” begins with Condit's first film in '81 Beneath the Skin. The videos/ films hauntingly betray these hovering psychological shadows between women: mothers and daughters, sister-to-sister, girlfriend trusting girlfriend.  Growing, living, loving and dying become the metaphors for these personal themes with which Condit works, often probing into repressed feelings, thoughts or desires where the exhibition crosses borders between strictly visual art and film. Here the audience/viewer must sit in one chair and don head phones to watch each video in the exhibition, except Annie Lloyd, which runs on a continuous 18 minute loop, projected large scale on the wall, in the darkened gallery.

In Inova's actual multiple seat theater gallery, Condit plays her latest three channel video piece which runs simultaneously on one wall titled The First Dream After Mother Died. The video/ installation mystically remembers a baby, where a woman dressed in a slip rummages around a basement. She births, and then finds, a baby doll, and considers if it is herself, or her mother. How women, both as mother and child, deal with this separation, death and loss fluidly transitions through each of these three interconnected screens and corresponding images in the theater.

Each video in the exhibition will disturb memories in the mind regarding family and friends, the deep feminine caverns to a hidden psyche that Condit discovers, until this ultimate end in death, and then dreams or ephiphanies in this process. Condit appears throughout the retrospective to be granting peace to herself, her mother and mortality. These concepts will translate if the viewer fully concentrates in the gallery, otherwise sections to the artist's message will be lost. It is easier to do this in the theater gallery because it feels more familiar to be in a theater. At least one video should be watched in its entirety to gain any meaning from the exhibition, although there are nine video works.

While each film/video will be worth watching, the exhibition requires a good afternoon to experience. These galleries remain dark, and one could easily become mentally lost in this darkness or trying to maintain focus moving from video to video because usually an audience remains captivated for a full-length film, instead of constant;y changing seats and subjects. Even the darkness itself may be distracting, unless sitting in their movie theater.

In this exhibition experience at Inova one contemplates aloneness instead of community even with the compelling quality to the films. With the definitions continually being blurred between the visual arts, and consequently, what belongs in a theater or gallery or museum, do film and other visual arts need to be separated or more merged?  As the access to video technology, including You Tube internet sites, grows exponentially, these questions will require serious reflection. Otherwise a trip to the art museum or gallery may play like sitting in one chair alone, once again isolated, similar to downloading a personal I Pad movie. Technology in one minute way brings the death of communal culture, because although it may allow the arts to reach more people, they are often reached in isolation, not in face to face encounters. And film may be one step removed from an original oil or watercolor, where one sees the brushstrokes and colors right before one's eyes, experiencing a little piece of the artist who painted the image. so intensely personal.