Caden Manson
Big Art Group - Caden Manson
Caden Manson is an artist, curator (Contemporary Performance and Special Effects Festival), and educator. Through the company Big Art Group, their performance work creates radical queer narrative structures and embodiments to construct and aid transitory generative critical space for participants and audience. Their work is dense, fast, multi-layered, and traverses multiple genres and forms, often using interference, slippage, and disruption strategies. Manson has presented throughout 14 countries and over 50 cities in Europe, Asia, and North America. Their projects have been co-produced by the Vienna Festival, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Hebbel Am Ufer, Rome’s La Vie de Festival, PS122, and Wexner Center for The Arts. Caden is a Foundation For Contemporary Art Fellow, Pew Fellow, and a MacDowell Fellow. Their writing, with Jemma Nelson, can be found in the publications PAJ, Theater Magazine, Theater der Zeit, and Theater Journal. Manson is the Director of The Theatre Program at Sarah Lawrence College, BA, MFA.
PRACTICE STATEMENT
My research and performances confront queer formlessness, image construction, code, and networked technologies. I use media techniques of interference, slippage, glitch, copy, loop, and disruption while focusing on strategies of the commons, mutual aid, and networked identity. My work is embodied in my company, Big Art Group, as performances, videos, and installations. In my creations, the body is plural and extends beyond the flesh. It takes substance within a matrix of pixels, resonances, avatars, and links. It cannot be held within a constituency of celluloid nor code, nor does it reflect in a mirror. It exists as a construct; vapor and drag without source or original. The body/framework traffics in bandwidth and gestures through frequency and speed.
As an educator, I teach the performance/media techniques that are part of my artistic practice and support strategies for experimentation, communing, and care in the academic institution. I co-curate the annual Special Effects Festival in New York City each year. The festival runs in the East Village for a week centering new forms and the work of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC performance artists.