𝘗𝘩𝘢𝘴𝘦𝘴, an exhibition of two interconnected works, presents a three-channel film installation and photographic portrait series made with teenage cross-country runners in rural Pennsylvania.
𝘍𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘒𝘪𝘭𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴, Contis’s first major film, follows the faces of three girls as they run a 5K cross-country race through the landscape. It is composed of three single takes, each one beginning with a shot from a starter pistol and ending after the runner completes her course. Each runner occupies a separate time—morning, midday, evening—but, in the gallery, the runners seem to move in unison, the sound of their breathing and footfalls filling the space.
A sequence of twenty-four black-and-white photographs accompanies the film as a parallel motion study. Contis made these intimate portraits as the runners approached or crossed the finish line. Both works explore running as ecstatic movement and performance—they are portraits of endurance that knot the anxiety and desire often projected onto young women. In them, one witnesses the way bodies moving through time become, for Contis, a way of 𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 time, their motion determining the shape and structure of her work.
“𝘗𝘩𝘢𝘴𝘦𝘴 recalls Eadweard Muybridge’s locomotion studies, which developed out of his obsession with capturing the moment-to-moment movement of animals and people. He even called a photographic sequence of a cantering horse a ‘series of phases,’ like those of the solar eclipse he documented just a year later. What the use of the word ‘phases’ suggests, for both Muybridge and Contis, is that a study of motion should be interpreted as a quest to understand time.” -Noa Wesley
𝘗𝘩𝘢𝘴𝘦𝘴 is organized by
@jennyjaskey , Chief Curator, and
@noawesley , Assistant Curator.
Installation photos:
@stevenprobertstudio 
