Talent Show
Single-channel Video Installation, Mixed Media,
1996, 4 min.
Talent Show satirizes music videos, while exploring sexual development in the age of the spectacle. The images in Talent Show are from the same found footage as Performance. The young boys lip-synch to a bubble gum rock song as they attempt to publicly assert their new-found sexual power. This display is disrupted both by the realistic "lyrics" in the soundtrack, and the comically over-enthusiastic thrusting of young boys' bodies as they flail about on stage.
Ladies, There’s a
Space You Can’t Go
Single-channel Video installation, Mixed media, 1995, 6 min.
Screened in the Whitney Biennial 1997. The video Ladies, There's a Space You Can't Go is a both a deconstruction and a distortion of an episode of Sally Jesse Raphael titled My Daughter Dresses Like A Hooker. Sampled audience statements and a driving dance beat merge with distorted talk show participants to form a self-mutilating music video. The daughters "exhibited" walk through the audience as if it were a runway. These mutated models perform for a disturbed mob of angry woman who relentlessly attack with threats of rape and diets.
Performance
Single-channel Video Installation, Mixed Media, 1995, 4 min.
The images are derived from found footage of an 8th grade talent show and are combined with a list of gender-specific transformative sexual memories from the age of 4-18. These thirteen year-old girls perform an out of step dance reminiscent of A Chorus Line. Their awkward bodies sway in slow motion as the dancers dissolve from one body to the next. The soundtrack is a list of transformative sexual memories combined with haunting, repetitious guitar riffs and drum beats. This awkward dance is that of adolescent girls whose sexual development is shaped by an awareness that they are the spectacle; an object to be worshipped and despised; a performer who exists as a reflection of the desire of others, while being consumed with desire themselves.