Rm 921: Colleen Plumb

Holding Rhythm, video projection is viewable dusk-midnight from the interior-facing windows of 21c Museum Hotel Chicago. An experimental video that weaves together vast landscapes with captive animals, it looks at the contradiction of keeping wild animals in captivity, raises questions about what it means to participate as a spectator, and acknowledges nature’s capacity to calm or soothe. How can paying attention to forces and rhythms of our natural world be a guide toward symbiosis, and contribute to pathways toward remedy?

Projected onto a 48-foot wall, Holding Rhythm is the inaugural commission for Rm 921 at 21c Chicago. Only viewable after dusk and from the windows of guest rooms with interior-facing windows. Designed to showcase immersive and experiential moving-image work in response to the unique space, Elevate: Rm 921 addresses complex issues that shape our diverse and rapidly changing world with a new local artist’s work commissioned annually.

Colleen Plumb makes photographs, videos, and installations, investigating contradictory relationships people have with nonhuman animals. Her work explores the way animals in captivity function as symbols of persistent colonial thinking, that a striving for human domination over nature has been normalized, and that consumption masks as curiosity. Plumb’s work sheds light on the abnormal behaviors of captive animals in order to bring attention to implicit values of society as a whole, particularly those that perpetuate power imbalance and tyranny of artifice.

Plumb’s work is held in several permanent collections and has been widely exhibited, including the Portland Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Blue Sky Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts in Portland, 21c, Oolite Arts in Miami, Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Southeast Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, Jen Bekman Gallery in New York, Edelman Gallery, AIPAD/Pier 94 in New York, Historic Water Tower Gallery and Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago. Her work has been part of the Midwest Photographers Project at the Museum of Contemporary Photography since 2003.

Her first photography monograph, Animals Are Outside Today (Radius Books, 2011) critically documents ambivalent dispositions towards animals. Plumb’s recent photography book, Thirty Times a Minute (Radius Books, 2020), examines the plight of captive elephants. Plumb’s work has appeared in LitHub, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Village Voice, Blow Photo Magazine, New York Times LENS, Time Lightbox, Psychology Today, Oxford American, Photo District News, and Orion Magazine.