Art and Gender

Sadie Benning is not only among the country's most respected and influential video artists, she also broke cultural ground as a founding member of the multimedia feminist band Le Tigre. Suspended Animation, the first monograph on the artist and the catalogue of her first U.S. museum exhibition, introduces Benning's paintings and Play Pause, an ambitious new two-channel video installation. Benning's videos, which she began to make in the late 1980s with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision 2000 "toy camera," are known for their explorations of loneliness, alienation, gender ambiguity and her own developing lesbian identity. Benning's recent paintings--flat, illustrative, exuberant--are playful, imaginary portraits that address similar themes. Play Pause, created entirely from hundreds of Benning's drawings, offers a rhythmic and affectionate view of contemporary life in a city's streets, parks and gay bars. Includes written contributions by Eileen Myles and Aleksandar Hemon, and a conversation with the New York painter Amy Sillman.

A compilation of Sadie Benning's video works produced between 1989 and 1998. Sadie Benning is a lesbian videomaker who began making videos when she was 15 years old using a Fisher-Price Pixelvision toy camera. Benning's early works were made in the privacy of her childhood bedroom, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries to record the thoughts and images that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity. Evoking in turn playful seduction and painful honesty, Benning's floating, close-up camera functions as a witness to her intimate diaristic revelations and as an accomplice in defining her evocative experimental form. Her work emerges from a place half-innocent and half-adult, with all the honesty, humor, and real desperation of a personality trapped and uncomfortable, just coming to self-awareness. Her more recent work moves beyond the Pixelvision camera into animation and film