Chartwell Notes

"Laresa Kosloff’s videos record staged actions using amateur performers. They share a particular quality of being out of synch in some way, appearing to be abstracted from real time or routine practices to focus more intently on embodied experiences, often with a comical dimension. In Agility drill (2011) Kosloff brings the performance into the gallery, setting up a series of coloured steel props, which look very like hurdles, at regular intervals down the length of the space. The performance involves Kosloff training someone via a protracted and clumsy process of learning through movement. In matching ‘sports’ outfits that create a doubling of sorts, Kosloff manually moves each of the arms and legs of the performer over the hurdles in a sequence reminiscent of a Buster Keaton sketch. The hurdles remain for the duration of the exhibition, a trace of the activation of the sculpture, while video footage of the performance is reintroduced as a screen-based element. Echoing the early stop frame photographic sequences of Eadweard Muybridge, Kosloff again fractures movement; she makes us more conscious of the human form in relation to the spaces we inhabit, the way our minds and bodies are required to work in unison, to analyse human interconnectedness and fallibility."
Social Sculpture exhibition essay by Charlotte Day