ARE YOU HAPPY

Through narrative and performance, Kipping explores histories of colonialism, U.S. History, violence, and trauma. Are You Happy is a body of work completed between 2017 and 2020 in Maine, where the artist was born and educated.

 

Kipping is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist. Her practice explores the experience of the Black body in the United States diaspora through the examination and deconstruction of historical and contemporary narratives. She is interested in the public, private, and civic negotiations of race, and gender in addition to the effects and practice of violence and surveillance. This work exists as performance, video, and photography, poetry/spoken word, collaborative education, educational collaboration, and installation.

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She has been awarded residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, School of Visual Arts, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and her work has been exhibited at Portland Museum of Art, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Yellow Fish Durational Performance Festival, and more. She currently teaches in the Fine Arts Department at The New School and works as the Marketing Associate at Hi-ARTS, a Harlem-based non-profit that BIPOC artists working in hip-hop and urban aesthetics.  

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eleanorkipping.com // @elfelicia 

Are You Happy (2020) 2-channel digital video, 00:12:14

Are You Happy is a meditation of personal and found footage, sound, and prose. The two channels speak with and against one another, competing for the viewer’s attention while also guiding one through consideration of Black life and death, joy, guilt, and loss.

 

Three Self-Portraits (2017 – )

Three Self-Portraits is an ongoing series of performative self-portraits exploring the relationship between Colonized land and the Black body. As an ongoing meditation on privilege, racial angst, and grief, the artist confronts viewers with unexpected contrasts of pose, dress, and composition against rural isolated landscapes.