Video artist Constance (Connie) Coleman uses the camera as a drawing tool, collecting source imagery which she transforms electronically into single channel videotapes. Her work addresses issues of personal identity, gender, politics, and media spectacle. Coleman collaborated with her husband, Alan Powell, beginning in the 1970s when they met while attending Rhode Island School of Design. Individually and collectively they explored, via video, various notions of personality, memory, and community and how meaning can be construed in urban and ex-urban habitats. Coleman and Powell carried a video camera wherever they went, using it “like a sketchbook."From the Artist
This print, titled The Inevitable Departure, grows out of a video graphic and computer graphic slide piece that was part of a solo exhibition at the Print Center of Philadelphia in the fall of 1996. That show, titled Borderland, and this print deal with my mourning the death of my mother, Mary Morse Coleman, who died in September 1995. The image in the print is taken from a videotape made by my partner, Alan Powell, on a walk that I took with my mother some time ago. By still-framing the videotape I put the series of images in into a computer—totally removed the background electronically—composited the "walk cycle" and repainted a background/foreground. The image was designed to be printed from an RGB file to a CMYK file via an ink jet printer. In a creative collaboration with KD Graphics the color separations were adjusted and finally printed on polyester film using a large format ink jet printer. These became the stencil from which my plates were made.
—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records
Connie Coleman was born in Cranston, RI. She earned her BFA and MAE from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. Her work has been exhibited at Abington Art Center, Jenkintown, PA; CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY; The Alternative Museum, New York...
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