Collaborations: > Bright Tenderness of Reality

A collaborative pairing with curator James Linnehan for the ICI Gallery in Los Angeles.www.culturalinquiry.org Institute of Cultural Inquiry|

Modes of becoming proliferate in Corey Hitchcock’s video world: edits are imprecise, equations are inelegant, line is not unerring, gravity is inconstant, objects are unintelligent, nature experiments before the camera, narrative is disrupted, illusion falters. Corey Hitchcock is what is referred to in fiction as an “unreliable narrator.” The 21st-century omniscient camera becomes just another object without proper or usual behaviors, as unseeing as the elegantly gloved hand which pokes through the scenery and draws. In these video dioramas the wildlife misbehaves, the scenery crumbles: the artist, revealed through occasional rips in the backdrop, is no more than a blind stagehand.

The Bright Tenderness of Reality brought to the curator’s mind a phrase from James Joyce: “the ineluctable modality of the visible.” The ineluctable is the visible—the real—the artwork—not the artist, not the curator. And bright?—because reality has intelligence and essential qualities; bright in that it has its own light, neither borrowed nor given … and shadows in Corey Hitchcock’s videos are shadows on the moon—pure, clear shadows—not the earthly shadows of cynicism or nostalgia or yearning—these are bright shadows.

James Linnehan defers to Jules Henri Poincaré’s “The Sciences and the Humanities” (1911) for his biography:

Amongst the men who have, always usefully but with differing degrees of brilliance, given service to science, some have received in their youth a solid classical education, refined in some cases, whereas the literary schooling of others has been rushed, incomplete and summary. It is tempting to conclude that literary study is useless to the scientist, since so many of them manage without. But that would be hasty. Is it really true that we can’t make out differences between the work of the one sort and the other and discern their hallmarks, so to speak? Well, that’s a comparison I don’t wish to carry out here. It would require me to name names, and I wouldn’t wish to offend anyone, even the dead. In such matters it is hard to judge, but if, in any case, we were to show that the one type were equally good scientists as the other, what exactly would be proven?

The fact of the matter is self-evident. For a long time, it has been difficult to make your name and, in general to rise above your station, without schooling. Those who have succeeded nonetheless have done so thanks to an exceptional energy which has made up for the lack of a range of other advantages, and which has put them on a par with more cultivated individuals of a less sturdy character.


Corey Hitchcock was raised until she reached the age of thirteen, in an isolated, suburban compound, without contact from the outside world. All of her visual work began as attempts to understand the larger world she encountered, once she had dug her way out.

She received her MFA from JFKU’s Arts and Consciousness program in 2005, and was given a Cadogan-Murphy award for her graduate work. She is a graduate of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies three-year program, has a transpersonal medicine practice, and engages geomantically with the Earth on a regular basis. She explores the shadow zones between worlds to retrieve hidden information about our compromised natural selves to help us remember what makes us most delightfully human.


From June 20 – 26, 201l, they can be viewed via the ICI website by following a link on the directory (landing) page. The virtual launch time is 12 p.m. on Monday, June 20, 2011.

A unique catalogue accompanies this exhibition and extends the Institute’s thinking on W.G. Sebald. Modeled on the New Museum's catalog for its 2008 landmark show After Nature, 100/10 catalogues exist as a dustcover enfolding a slightly used copy of a book that has influenced the show's curator and artist. The 100/10∆9 catalog, wrapped around Ivar Ekeland’s Mathematics and the Unexpected, may be purchased in the mobile ICI gift shop at the A&C Gallery or at the ICI website