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A Place Called Lovely

Sadie Benning

1991 00:14:00 United StatesEnglishB&WStereo4:3Pixelvision video
Tags:
Crime or Violence , Feminism , LGBTQ , Pixelvision , Sexuality

Description

“Nicky is seven. His parents are older and meaner.” A Place Called Lovely references the types of violence individuals find in life, from actual beatings, accidents and murders, to the more insidious violence of lies, social expectations, and betrayed faith. Benning collects images of this socially-pervasive violence from a variety of sources, tracing events from childhood: movies, tabloids, children's games (like mumbledy-peg), personal experiences, and those of others. Throughout, Benning uses small toys as props and examples—handling and controlling them the way we are, in turn, controlled by larger violent forces.

This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 2.

About Sadie Benning

Sadie Benning began making videos at 15-years old, using a Fisher Price Pixelvision toy camera. Benning's early works were made in the privacy of their childhood bedroom, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries to record 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 their intimate revelations, and as an accomplice in defining their evocative experimental form. Sadie's work emerges from a place half-innocent and half-adult — with all the honesty, humor, and desperation of a personality just coming into self-awareness, trapped and uneasy. Their more recent work moves beyond the Pixelvision camera and into animation, film and installation.

Sadie Benning is a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow.

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Yes