Sawing A Woman In Half

MFA Student

Major: Sculpture

Graduation Year: 2017

Artist Statement:

The work of Crystal Gale Phelps uses interdisciplinary approaches involving dance, sculpture, and drawing to construct eccentric and absurd relationships that open contradictory dialogues. The body as subject and object claims space to re-contextualize positions of power and the semiotics of identity. She challenges the assumptions of the history of Performance Art, dance, and contemporary circus arts and works along the edges of all three histories. Through circus inspired choreography and the use of prop like objects her work highlights the presence and absence of bodies in space and negotiates terrain that is fraught with the ghosts of embodied experience and muscle memory. For Phelps, this precarious space is where individual and social embodiment coalesce and where positions of power can be challenged and subverted.