Kate Gilmore loves a challenge. For her performance-based video works, she sets up difficult physical tasks (a precarious tower of strung-together furniture to climb, for instance), dons lipstick and a fancy dress, and documents herself making the attempt. She has jumped rope on a perforated wooden platform while wearing stilettos (Double Dutch, 2004), ascended a slippery ramp in rollerskates (Cake Walk, 2005), and forced her satin-clad body through a tiny tunnel (Main Squeeze, 2006). This exhibition will be on display from September 5-December 7, 2008. The dogged persistence of Gilmore’s protagonists suggests the obsessive behavior that characterize daily efforts to cope with high expectations. These dolled-up women seem desperate for success, love, or attention—desires traditionally bound up with gender and the condition of artmaking. In all of her projects, Gilmore strives for compositional perfection, and her incongruous party clothes are always perfectly coordinated with the installation itself. Combining physical comedy, palpable effort, and a whiff of real danger, Gilmore’s work evokes time-based “endurance” work of the 1970s, such as that of Vito Acconci, and expands on feminist and performance art in the tradition of Joan Jonas and Marina Abramovic.

For the Project Space, Gilmore will construct a new challenge and star in a corresponding video, to be shown alongside several earlier video works.