christopher steadman resides and works in Berlin, London and New York.
His multiple-channel synchronised video pieces have been exhibited widely throughout Europe and America. Steadman has received numerous awards and grants, including a British Academy Arts and Humanities Research Bursary and funding from the Austrian Federal Chancellery, as well as fellowships from many international artist residencies, including Yaddo, MacDowell and Chateau La Napoule.
Born in a village in England, Steadman moved to the U.S.A. at age 13. He worked and studied in NYC and London, receiving a Master’s in Photography from NYU/ICP (International Center of Photography) and a Master in Fine Arts from Central St. Martin’s.
He continues to create and develop multi-monitor installations, expanding the number of monitors used and the technical complexity of his medium. His work has matured, both in texture and voice. He stopped using himself as subject, and found a fresh vision by distancing artist from art, which alternatively coerces all that is around him to speak in his place. His recent installations come across as more polished, and yet manage to maintain the excitement and innovation of something raw, homemade, and deeply personal.
“Steadman seems to possess one of those rare spirits that serves to remind those around him that there are few pursuits more noble or more fundamental to the affirmation of our human worth than to make art.” (2011)
There has been a significant shift in emphasis and power from christopher steadman's earlier pieces to his later projects in development, moving from fixed-point performances to saturated multiple presences and entry points. Steadman’s interest in narrative, memory and abstraction lends his work an ability to cross art mediums and transcend categorisation beyond the digital mediums he usually employs. Viewers are able to enter and observe the work in a configured space, while the content instead is often an abstract, fractured, fragmented series of experiences, offered through which the viewer must make meaning.
Recently steadman's subject matter is focused on the centrality of memory, and the articulation of memory as a mutating system functioning within a set of larger cultural and environmental systems. The exploration of subjects claims for solitude and social belonging are themes steadman expresses across a range of practices, including photographic and video installations, and present in works that are structurally concerned with time, space and duration.
