Part of Winter 2010
Pleasure Dome is pleased to present the Canadian premiere of Erin Cosgrove’s What Manner of Person Art Thou? (video, 2008, 65 min.) This animated video relates the twisted tale of Elijah Yoder and Enoch Troyer; two anachronistic believers who dispense violent justice on those they deem to be evildoers. Yoder and Troyer, the only survivors of two small Amish-like colonies in the Northwestern U.S., after a series of catastrophes and epidemics. The two set off on a journey to find any remaining relatives and begin dispensing violent justice on the evildoers of contemporary society; each encounter represents one of the seven deadly sins. Within this black comedy structure, Yoder and Troyer are allegorical figures that represent the corruptibility of faith. The striking visuals are inspired by the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry. The video is a darkly funny tale of the corruption of modern life and the hazards of morality.
www.whatmannerofpersonartthou.com
Text by Julian Gough. Blood and Irony
http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/146
Erin Cosgrove was born in 1969 and lives in Los Angeles. She received her BFA from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 1996, and her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2001. Cosgrove has had solo exhibitions at the Espace Croisé Centre d’Art Contemporain, Roubaix, France; Carl Berg Gallery, Los Angeles; and Printed Matter Inc., New York. Group exhibitions of her work include the COLA Fellowship Exhibition, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; City Beat: Internet Video Exhibition, Brooklyn Museum; and Los Angeles Art Now, Galleri S.E. International Contemporary Art, Bergen, Norway. In 2008 she received the Creative Capital Film and Video Grant and the Center for Cultural Innovation Investing in Artists Grant, and in 2004 she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2003 Sundance Channel’s TVLab produced her seven-minute animation and live-action video, A Heart Lies Beneath, and that year her novel, The Baader-Meinhof Affair, was published by Printed Matter, Inc., New York.
