Having studied both acting and visual arts, Catherine Sullivan has recently brought her career as scriptwriter, actor, and fringe theater director to the gallery space. Incorporating photography and video to her practice, the Los Angeles-based artist combines unlikely sets of sources to synthesize the black box and the white cube.

'Tis a Pity She's a Fluxus Whore (2003), a two-screen film installation, exemplifies Sullivan's approach. First presented at the Wadsworth Athaneum in Hartford, Connecticut, the side-by-side projections document a re-staging of two events: a performance of John Ford's 17th century play, presented at the Wadsworth in 1943; and a 1964 Fluxus performance festival held in Aachen, Germany. Sullivan's actors were filmed in the same locations as the originals, except reversed: her Fluxus artists were filmed in Hartford and Fordean protagonists in Germany. This gesture recalls Bertolt Brecht's theater experimentations and frees the actors from the constraints of verisimilitude, a theme pursued by Sullivan in other works.

Five Economies (big hunt/little hunt) (2002), Sullivan's most ambitious video installation to date, incorporates a kaleidoscopic array of acting styles and scenes from well-known films. big hunt is a silent, five-screen, twenty-one minute labyrinth of virtuosic dramatic performance. The scenes were taken from the films Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, The Miracle Worker, Persona, Tim, and Marat/Sade; the real-life story of Birdie Jo Hoaks, a woman who disguised herself as a young boy to collect welfare benefits; and the tradition of Irish wake amuseuments, in which participants would often play physically rough games with each other. Each was chosen to illustrate Elias Canetti's claim, in Crowds and Power, that power relationships stem from humans' past as both hunter and prey. Actors chosen by Sullivan, filmed in black and white, randomly switch roles as the vignettes slide by, variously communicating hysteria, melancholy, or stoicism solely through physical gesture, while the installation as a whole permanently delays narrative resolution. In little hunt, the actors and styles are relatively static; an overweight male trained as a ballroom dancer stands across a tennis court from a female postmodern dancer. However, the setting and our sense of time is askew, as the actors each navigate a selection of props from Les Misérables and daylight and nighttime abruptly flip-flop during the film's fifteen minutes. The vivid interaction between big hunt's actors is mirrored by the relative isolation of those in little hunt.

Rendering multiple permutations of each scene, assigning multiple actors to the same lines, and choosing source materials already part of a cultural lexicon atomizes the “total experience” usually offered in a theatrical production. Sullivan, both in front of and behind the lens, picks up the pieces and interrogates them, emphasizing repeated acts of transformation and the uncertainty they generate.