Spotlight on Recent Acquisitions

Catherine Sullivan
Triangle of Need
2007

Catherine Sullivan’s works provide completely immersive visual and aural experiences. Triangle of Need, her most ambitious work to date, epitomizes her interest in hybridizing various disciplines, integrating everything from film, dance, figure skating and choreography to literature, theater and history.

The story of Triangle of Need revolves around disparities of wealth and poverty; it unfolds in two main locations: Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, a Venetian fantasy built by agricultural industrialist James Deering in Miami, and an ordinary apartment in a generic American city. Sullivan inserts two unresolved narratives into each setting, one involving the wealthy industrialist trying to force the last remaining members of a primitive hominid species to reproduce; and the second, a series of reconstructions of scenes from the catalogue of Pathescope Films, the company from which Deering ordered silent film reels for screening at Vizcaya.

Catherine Sullivan
still from Triangle of Need, 2007
Multi-channel video installation
Collection of Miami Art Museum, gift of Ella Fontanals-Cisneros

Triangle of Need embodies Sullivan's collaborative working process. For this work, she partnered with Minneapolis choreographer Dylan Skybrook to develop specific movements for the Neanderthals. Sullivan also worked with figure skater Rohene Ward and Nigerian actor/director Kunle Afolayan. Sean Griffin, a Los Angeles-based composer and the artist's frequent collaborator, invented a complex language from theories of Neanderthal speech as well as an original score blends prehistoric flutes, American parlor music and hymns by 17th-century composer Joachim Neander.

Catherine Sullivan attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Among the museums which have presented solo exhibitions of her work are Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthalle Zurich; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Renaissance Society, Chicago. Her work also was included in the Whitney Biennial of 2004.