Claudia Bitrán: Stereotypies

Claudia Bitrán: Stereotypies A

ISBN: 978-1-7355856-8-0

Claudia Bitrán: Stereotypies March 11 – April 16, 2022

CRISTIN TIERNEY GALLERY 219 BOWERY, FLOOR 2, NEW YORK, NY 10002

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Stereotypies, the title of Claudia Bitrán’s exhibition, refers to an involuntary repetitive action found in human and animal behavior. Exacerbated by stress and anxiety, these actions often present themselves as persistent and uncontrollable movements or language performed as a self-soothing mechanism.

This phenomenon loosely connects the three bodies of work on view at the gallery. Bitrán’s paintings and video animations explore the intersection of pop culture and contemporary art, drawing from mediated images of people and animals sourced from the internet. Featured is a watercolor animation of Gus the polar bear who lived at the Central Park Zoo from 1988-2013. In the video, he swims back and forth endlessly in his enclosure as a crowd watches with people occasionally shouting and pounding on the glass. Known as the “Neurotic Polar Bear,” Gus’s endless laps in the pool were ultimately discovered to be compulsive.

Bitrán has long been interested in the circulation and consumption of viral imagery, and more specifically in how women are often the subjects of this violent system of mass distribution. Included in the show are two bodies of work examining circulated imagery. First are portraits of Britney Spears, sourced from paparazzi and fan photos as well as the pop star’s own Instagram posts. Also featured is the Be Drunk Series: paintings and animations of drunk people and their viral epic fails.

Bitrán creates her animations by painting a single frame of the video, photographing it and painting the next frame directly on top of the one before. The stills are then looped to create a video with the process resulting in two works: an animation and a canvas layered with all the scenes start to finish. Her process mirrors the stereotypy, as covering each previous painting can seem to be a pointless repetition.

Another highlight of the exhibition is a video made from a compilation of clips of Spears dancing in her home. Using excerpts from Spears’ Instagram, Bitrán’s painting animation shows the artist spinning around in endless loops, seemingly twirling for eternity. Although the video lasts for less than a minute, it is made from 169 individual paintings of Spears imposed one over the other.

In repainting this viral imagery, Bitrán invites viewers to reconsider how we consume images and narratives distributed by the media. Stereotypies reframes the lens through which we view these individuals, asking viewers to empathize with and reconsider the figures they depict—while simultaneously exploring how images become part of the endless cycle of mass consumption that happens online.

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Britney Twirling, 2022. video animation. 27 seconds.

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Britney Twirling, 2022. acrylic on linen.

48 x 28 inches (121.92 x 71.12 cm).

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Gus, 2022. video animation. 18 seconds.

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Britney Portraits 11, 2021. oil on canvas.

17 x 14 inches (43.2 x 35.6 cm).

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Britney Portraits 14, 2021. oil on canvas.

17 x 14 inches (43.2 x 35.6 cm).

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Claudia Bitrán: Stereotypies

By Cassie da Costa

Writers like to discuss pain as a “site.” As if on an archeological dig or a location scout, in our imaginations, pain tends to be locatable. Here is where it hurts. Here is where I got hurt. Virginia Woolf famously wrote that sufferers of pain lack language to describe their experience. But a writer, like Woolf, can turn pain into something else in order to give it expression. The site, then, offers a set of boundaries, a hyperfocal point from which language can be generated. Yet the ability to see pain and then transmit that vision—that “sight”—not just into knowledge, but experience, is something else. Visual artist Claudia Bitrán sees pain as locomotive and eruptive—not merely enduring at a single site, but transforming through time and across a spectrum of sensation.

With her painting animations and the final works that result from the process, she overwhelms the typical fixed or finished form of a painting by layering image over image with heavy brushstrokes. The layering produces new images while accumulating traces of what appeared before; the painting(s) then, occurs on multiple levels and in several moments—as video, as frame, as portrait, as collage.

In animation, the transition from one image to another is called the smear frame. Bitrán’s paintings of Britney Spears, an international pop star increasingly characterized by her struggle to release herself from a 13-year conservatorship, identify the smear—or the transition of Spears’ body from position to position— as the evocative core of the image. Adapting videos Spears posted of herself dancing in her living room on Instagram, Bitrán splices together currents of pain and joy. In an Instagram caption, Spears professed to recording and posting the dancing videos—featuring successive spins, twirls, and dips—as a way of holding onto positivity and enjoyment during periods of immense struggle and lack of agency. Now, free of her conservatorship, she continues to post dance videos, a reprisal of her coping behavior but with a fresh context. Bitrán is captivated by the trace left by looped, or repeated, movements. In these repetitions—Spears’ twirls and Bitrán’s brushstrokes—the

viewer is enveloped in a blur of sensation. This is pain, not only at its most acute “site” but in its enduring resonances.

Stereotypies, Bitrán’s first New York solo show at Cristin Tierney Gallery, finds its voice in the loop, comprised of alternately unbearable and exuberant repetitions. “Stereotypy” is a term used by clinicians to describe repetitive movements or sounds made by people who otherwise exhibit “normal” development of motor control. Usually associated with various pathologies, Bitrán expands the term to describe a range of affective modes. In the gallery space, portraits of Spears made famous in tabloids juxtapose her dancing animation. This time, the stereotypy registers in the typification of media portrayals.

Britney stares vulnerably into space with her golden locks framing her round visage, sucks a lollipop in a trucker hat, exposes her partially bald head during a crisis. Critiquing the tabloid photos on which the paintings are based, Bitrán’s thick, heavy, and at times blurry brushstrokes amplify the affective proximity the viewer feels towards the image—and then perhaps the subject, too.

And why Britney? Bitrán has documented her own emotional, and literal, closeness to Spears in her art beyond painting. The artist impersonated the pop star for a competition for which she was awarded a brief meeting and photo op with the singer in 2017.

Immortalizing her impersonation in video art, Bitrán has staged reenactments of Spears’ music video choreography. The choreography’s repetitive gestures flow from Spears’ body (of work) to Bitrán’s. Reenactment, for Bitrán, is part of an evolving expression of proximity to the pop cultural figure or artifact, from obsession to curiosity to empathy to exposure and back again. It’s the artist’s loop—not flatly mimetic but roundly sensuous and stereotypic.

In the loop, and in the gallery, there are uncomfortable proximities and juxtapositions, too. Be Drunk, Bitrán’s series of paintings and animations drawn from videos of young people on the brink of alcohol 31

poisoning and agitated animals, re-interpret morbid, exploitative images originally played for laughs.

The series is titled after Baudelaire’s poem that begins, “You have to always be drunk. That’s all there is to it—/ it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden/ of time that breaks your back and bends you to the/ earth, you have to be continually drunk.”

Bitrán complicates Baudelaire’s assertion by tangling up pain in the act of physical abandon. To the viewer of Bitrán’s Be Drunk paintings, the “horrible burden of time” is still observable in the layering of images, even—perhaps especially—within the throws of the subject’s literal or psychological drunkenness. Still, within these paintings are again a blurring, a smear between layered images that re-trace the vulnerable subjects represented within. These bodies, painted over and over again, transition between impressionistic and expressionistic forms; the subject, totally wasted, endures both realism and distortion. Within a single body, pain seems to travel through historical periods and settings. There’s a softening effect to this method, but also, the paintings contain an unsurmountable melancholy. Here, Bitrán, who grew up both in her native Chile and the U.S., challenges the very U.S. American theme of redemption. These drunk girls, boys, and animals do not get their comeuppance, are not immortalized in glory, but rather, traced in elaborations of pain and confusion. Bitrán doesn’t reclaim drunkenness so much as she reframes it—its stakes not merely in experiential but critical ground. The paintings seem to question what we can observe or witness outside the realm of bodily control.

This final work is of Stereotypies’ non-person: Gus, the polar bear. The video from which Bitrán adapted the painting animation has sound, while the animation does not. A child bangs on the aquarium glass as Gus swims languidly back and forth. Bitrán has rendered the polar bear in watercolor, which creates a smudging effect, rendering the movement droopier and more traceable. His eyes, too, are more expressive. In pain, time does slow, sensation accentuates, movements become more or less deliberate. For the viewer, the feelings the painting may elicit can quickly transition into deeper, more self-critical reflection. For instance, it’s easier to sympathize with a polar bear if you lament the Arctic’s melting ice caps. Easier to experience that affective proximity to Gus if you worry about the fate of his species and the larger meaning of his captivity. Yet even the climate-conscious, polar-bear-empathizing viewer may not be so far off from the child banging mindlessly on the glass. In both scenarios, as the viewer or observer searches for some kind of comfort or catharsis, Gus remains behind the glass. The loop of the painting animation, then, is an attempt to bring us closer to the subject’s experience than the fixed, single image can: No matter what we do, think, or feel, the pain endures.

In the end, however, there are “sites” in Bitrán’s stereotypies. After seeing the animations, in looking at the final, layered paintings, the viewer—like Bitrán has—can finally make an object of what has occurred. She can probe the layers, looking through thick accumulations of paint for traces of past images. Or she can experience this accumulation as It’s the critical, and at times ambivalent, angle of something beyond an image itself, locating her own Bitrán’s work that pulses through each layer and trace. pain in it. So, pain itself isn’t a “site” of something but We get the sense of pain transmitted back and forth, perhaps the paintings are. Bitrán’s animations, in turn, from artist to subject, subject to artist. The tedious become the expansion of these sites into experience. stereotypy of painting layer over layer might even And the completed paintings transmit these experiproduce its own experience of pain. When I speak to ences back into an accumulation of sites, of points or her after she’s spent several weeks completing a final triggers for the viewer. And over again, and again. work for the show, she’s warm and personable, yet fatigued. A look wavers between smile and grimace.

There’s another smear: between Bitrán’s practice and her subjects’ expressions.

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Britney Portraits 7, 2021. oil on canvas.

17 x 14 inches (43.2 x 35.6 cm).

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Britney Portraits 4, 2021. oil on canvas.

17 x 14 inches (43.2 x 35.6 cm).

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Britney Portraits 10, 2021. oil on canvas.

17 x 14 inches (43.2 x 35.6 cm).

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PREVIOUS SPREAD:

Be Drunk, 2020. series of 31 acrylic on canvas paintings and video animations. Canvas: 10 x 11 inches 25.4 x 27.9 cm) each.

Video: 1:46 minutes (full loop).

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The series Be Drunk reimagines the poem of the same name by Charles Baudelaire using recordings of drunk teens and “fail” videos found on YouTube and the internet. Each piece of the poem relates to an animation that the artist has rendered in acrylic.

Selected works are included in this catalog.

Be Drunk

By Charles Baudelaire You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish.

But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking… ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk!

So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

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So As Not to Feel the Horrible Burden of Time

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You Have to be Continually Drunk

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Everything That Is Speaking

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Ask What Time It Is

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It Is Time to be Drunk

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On Wine

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You have to be always drunk.

That’s all there is to it— it’s the only way.

So as not to feel the horrible burden of time

That breaks your back and bends you to the earth,

You have to be continually drunk.

But on what? On wine,

Poetry

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Or virtue, as you wish.

But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace

Or the green grass of a ditch,

In the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone,

Ask the wind,

The wave,

The star,

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The bird, the clock,

Everything that is flying,

Everything that is groaning,

Everything that is rolling,

Everything that is singing,

Everything that is speaking…

Ask what time it is

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And wind, wave,

Star, bird,

Clock will answer you:

“It is time to be drunk!

So as not to be the martyred slaves of time,

Be drunk, be continually drunk!

On wine,

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On poetry

Or on virtue

As you wish.”

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Claudia Bitrán (b. 1986, Chilean-American) works primarily in painting and video, frequently using DIY aesthetics to represent the hyperbolic worlds of social media and pop culture. The artist employs a wide range of painting strategies to metamorphosize her source material, resulting in dense and thick surfaces that transform the content of the artist’s videos. The artist holds an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (2013), a BFA from the Universidad Católica de Chile (2009) and was recently an artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works, New York. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Bitrán has exhibited individually at Walter Storms Galerie in Munich, Spring Break Art Show in NY, Muhlenberg College Gallery and Practice Gallery in PA, the Brooklyn Bridge Park in NY, Roswell Museum and Art Center in New Mexico, and at Museo de Artes Visuales in Santiago Chile. She has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Smack Mellon Studio Program, Outpost Projects, and Pioneer Works. Grants and awards include: The New York Trust Van Lier Fellowship, Hammersley Grant, Emergency Grant for Artists Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Jerome Foundation Grant for Emerging Filmmakers, 1st Prize Britney Spears Dance Challenge, 1st Prize UFO McDonald’s Painting Competition, and 1st honorable mention at Bienal de Artes Mediales, Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile.

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Photography credits:

Elisabeth Bernstein: 4-5, 11, 15-17, 23, 28-29, 40-43

Cristin Tierney Gallery 219 Bowery, Floor 2 New York, NY 10002 212.594.0550 www.cristintierney.com