"Muskel Signal" (12 mins. looped, 4-channel synched video installation.) Exhibition shot (Detail of 4 monitors.) The artist performing ritualistic routines.
Christopher Steadman resides and works in Berlin, London and New York.
His multiple-channel synchronized video pieces have been exhibited widely, including venues in Berlin, London, Paris, and New York. Presently his work can be seen in a show curated by Gary Hill at Seattle's Center on Contemporary Art. Steadman has received numerous awards and grants as well as fellowships from many international artist residencies.
Recently Steadman's subject matter is focused on the centrality of memory, and the articulation of memory as a mutating system functioning within a set of larger cultural and environmental systems. The exploration of subjects claims for solitude and social belonging are themes Steadman expresses across a range of practices, including photographic and video installations, and present in works that are structurally concerned with time, space, and duration.
For it is within the context of these elements that the psyche of the solitary individual must make sense of both their own and other's existence. Steadman's interest in the notion of chance and metamorphoses brought about by the weight of memory, allows the artist to communicate a tension between the ephemeral fluidity of the moving images and the physicality of the monitors, heightening a sense of weight by the fixed configuration of the installation.
There has been a significant shift in emphasis and power from Christopher Steadman's earlier pieces to his later projects in development, moving from fixed-point performances to saturated multiple presences and entry points. Steadman's interest in narrative, memory and abstraction lends his work an ability to cross art mediums and transcend categorisation beyond the digital mediums he usually employs. Viewers are able to enter and observe the work in a configured space, while the content instead is often an abstract, fractured, fragmented series of experiences, offered through which the viewer must make meaning.
