Interconnectedness is a tricky term to embrace. Personal technology and global communication systems claim to provide access to those we love and those we will never physically meet, forming ties between bloodlines and nations. Yet the feeling of so much information exchanged loosely binds and barely fills inner emotional gaps that crave recognition and release. Instead of confrontation, consumption and technologically mediated disengagement have become cushions against the experience of physical and emotional pain.

My work responds to the spaces left between what is said and what is silent. I am concerned with addressing common, overlooked behaviors and collective emotional states that cross cultural boundaries and link individuals in ways that are outside the polarizing polemics of politics, ethnicity, race and class. To explore these themes, I extract my material from the everyday and employ traditions of performance art, mixed with the methods and subversive agenda of conceptual art. Many of the works utilize repetitive examples of black humor and irony as devices to push perceived levels of comfort and open channels toward reflection and self-awareness. Through the use of video, photography, installation, sound, and sculpture, I aim to achieve a form through which the viewer can undergo a loss of time in the exploration of universal concepts hidden within the thin lines of purpose that attach us to histories, traditions, and social identities.

The intention is to let go of the skin and surface, and slip into a state of challenging silence. Kathryn Cornelius was born in 1978 in Binghamton, NY. She spent seven years dancing with the Kopernick Polish Dance Troupe, and produced numerous plays and poetry collections during her younger years. As an undergraduate at Ithaca College in Ithaca, NY, she competed in Track and Field and Field Hockey, taught webpage and graphic design to faculty, and continued to develop her poetry. During the fall of 1998 she studied at the Ithaca College London Centre, and took classes in Art and Art History through the Tate Britain. Though she began her studies as a Biology major with a concentration in Genetics, her experience in London motivated her change in majors. During her senior year she took classes in Printmaking at Cornell University, and volunteered in the Education Program at Cornell?s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English, with minors in Art History, Biology and Creative Writing. Her undergraduate thesis, entitled "Mirrors, Windows and Gardens: Images of Transition in Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Painting," was produced jointly with the English and Art and Art History Departments, and included research conducted through the Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Her first major installation work was included in the Handwerker Gallery?s group show, Do It.

After completing her BA, Kathryn moved to Washington DC, where she has since been living and producing her art. Recently she completed her Master of Arts in the interdisciplinary degree of Communication, Culture and Technology through Georgetown University. During her degree program, Kathryn continued her art practice, often integrating performance, sculpture and installation works into the heavy critical theory curriculum of the Technology, Art and Representation degree focus. She interned at the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, and worked briefly at two art galleries, G Fine Art and Irvine Contemporary. An activist for local art production, she has collaborated with the artist collective Decatur Blue, donated art work to support the non-profit District of Columbia Arts Center, and has for four years been a Steering Committee member of the Phillips Collection Contemporaries Board, where she serves as Chair of the Education Subcommittee.

Her travels from a young age have taken her across North America, through Europe, to Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland, and have been important to the formation of the social concerns addressed in her artwork. Her collage/DJ-style approach to media including sound, image-making, video, and text inform her method of artistic production. She has had the fortunate experience of participating in the public performances of Marina Abramovic (as a public performer for Dream Bed at Sean Kelly Gallery 2002, and as a public performer for Spirit Cooking, Art Basel Miami Beach 2004), Hayley Newman (as a participating performer at the Tate Modern during the Experience and Archive: The Transformation of Action performance art workshop), Tania Bruguera (as a participating performer in the live performance of Autobiografia at Art Basel Miami Beach 2004), and Guillermo Gomez-Pena (as a participating performer in Ex-Centris: A Living Diorama of Fetishized Others, at the Tate Modern, part of the Live Culture Symposium 2003). Additional influences include Bill Viola, Andrea Fraser, David Byrne, Pierre Bourdieu, Rebecca Horn, Mark Dion, Milan Kundera, Mark Rothko, Sigur Ros, David Lynch, Jenny Holzer, e.e. cummings, Paul Virilio, and Roland Barthes.