Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center,
Troy NY

KATE GILMORE

Main Squeeze, 2006

Single channel video, 4:59 minutes

Courtesy of the artist

Kate Gilmore is a video and performance artist who creates a series of onerous tasks and records herself enacting them. In Main Squeeze, she slowly pulls herself through a narrow, girdle-like wooden structure too small for her body. The video image is split into two formal registers, simultaneously showing the artist from above and below as she makes her way through the structure, amid the brutal sounds of labored breathing and her flesh scraping against the wood. Referencing the bygone term for a girlfriend, Main Squeeze relates the artist's staged confinement to the claustrophobic quality of gender roles. Gilmore's heels and skirt (which at one point catches against the wood) take on the qualities of the wooden box, becoming yet another layer of difficulty Gilmore must transgress.

  • EXHIBITIONKate Gilmore, Uncertain Spectator / Video still from Main Squeeze, 2006, courtesy of the artist.

    Kate Gilmore, Uncertain Spectator / Video still from Main Squeeze, 2006, courtesy of the artist.
  • EXHIBITIONKate Gilmore, Uncertain Spectator / Video still from Main Squeeze, 2006, courtesy of the artist.

    Kate Gilmore, Uncertain Spectator / Video still from Main Squeeze, 2006, courtesy of the artist.