Work By Courtney Kurysh
NAME: Courtney Kurysh
BIRTHDATE: September 12, 1987
AREA OF INTEREST: Performance art, video performance, large format photography
PRACTICE: Using self-imagery through the mediums of photography, video performance, and live performance, Kurysh questions issues of temporality and identity through her work. As she began to read more about photographic theory, particularly Sontag’s idea of “photography as the inventory of mortality”, Kurysh began to view her self-images as document of her presence and eventual absence and her own record of mortality, which led to an exploration of impermanence and temporality. These ideas are continually explored through her series photographs of fresh unmarked graves, “The Ground Will Forget”. As the body dissolves into landscape, it will eventually be physically absent while the memory remains present for those of the deceased. Having difficulty dealing with change, Kurysh appears to focus on the largest physical change we face in life: eventual death.
Her video and live performance practice comes from a fiercely feminist instinct and a constant questioning of female roles and expectation in Western society. Using her body as the canvas and drawing upon the use of masochism in performance art in the 1970s, she seeks to find a place for the confrontational art of that era in the twenty-first century. Drawing theoretical and physical inspiration from Martha Rosler and Vito Acconci respectively, Kurysh subjects her body various tortures of everyday female realities regarding body image, challenging the trappings of the female sex and hoping to come to grips with her own place in the continuum of female identity.
