Sadie Benning is a transgender American video and film
artist. She has had a constant focus in her work that are related to the themes
of gender and gender roles, sexuality, identity, language and the all of these
play a part and exist in society starting from the youth and through the stages
of growing older. Starting out at a young age, Benning has experimented with
other digital media outlets other than video, although this is her most
popular, she has also used different approaches to her work. Beginning with
overtly pixilated videos to those with different levels of clarity and using
the different techniques of the relationship audio and visual aspects have in
relation to one another allowed for the dynamic facet that her work in later
years held.
Flat is Beautiful is
an example of Benning’s work that utilizes both visual approaches of pixilation
and clarity while really getting at gender and sexuality as identity in the
youth of society. The masks are very evidently being used to directly get at
the journey to identity or the hiding of identity in youth of society and is
being seen the same for young individuals who would most likely in the viewer’s
point of view have different identities. Carrying out average child activities,
Benning leaves much up to the viewer’s interpretation still as she doesn’t lead
in a direction of what to do about this but rather introduces this and leaves
the later thinking to the viewer.
Still using the theme of identity Benning utilizes herself
and her exploration of identity in the video work If Every Girl Had a Diary. She is able to capture the thoughts and
feelings that were experienced when figuring out her self-identity while having
the extra external influences of society and societal roles and institutions
that add pressures for what an identity should and should not be. These
emotions ad struggles are what Benning expresses to display the importance identity
has.
In her work The Whole
World is (Still) Watching, Benning has a different approach with displaying
her work through an older television set to recall and show times of the past
through history. These videos being shown were about the correlation to
politics, society and violent actions that were happening in society.
http://www.vdb.org/titles/flat-beautiful
http://www.vdb.org/titles/if-every-girl-had-diary
http://www.vdb.org/titles/whole-world-still-watching
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