LGBTQ

Future From Inside is the last in the trilogy begun in 2016, by Dani and Sheilah ReStack (also including Strangely Ordinary this Devotion and Come Coyote.) The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work.

There is no future in reproduction. I have no concern with any species extending itself through time. You think you have given birth to a baby, when really you have given birth to a bus driver, or tax collector. Instead I'm interested in the placenta, the real mother of us all, forgotten discarded. The softest machine, all lipids and blood, that blooms and rots like any vegetal/floral martyr. That umbilical cord did not connect you to your mother. It connected you to that most partial of objects — the placenta — part you, part mom, all martyr and garbage.

The Hundred Videos is a project undertaken by prolific video artist Steve Reinke, including 100 video works made from 1989-1996. Discussing death, sex, the body, philosophy, and contemporary art, The Hundred Videos defines a unique style of video-essay for the end of the 20th Century. 

"Each disquieting image breaks down into a pixel, each pithy phrase into a word, and Reinke's stream of video-thought continues apace. The corpse won't stop talking."

— Jon Davies, Images Festival: Spotlight Essay, April 2018

Flat is Beautiful is an experimental live-action cartoon using masks, animation, subtitles, drawings, and dramatic scenes to investigate the psychic life of an androgynous eleven-year-old girl. Growing up in a working class neighborhood with her single mother and gay roommate, Taylor confronts the loneliness of living between masculine and feminine in a culture obsessed with defining gender difference. Shifting between black and white film and grainy pixelvision video, Flat is Beautiful explores the internal and external worlds of sad people.

Part Two of Secret Spaces. A sensitive soul with skin receptive to the World's natural elements and who has a mind open for expansive contemplation, embarks on an 'inner journey' towar the New Age of awareness.

Covert Action is a stunning melange of rapid-fire retro imagery accomplishing Child’s proclaimed goal to “disarm my movies.” “I wanted to examine the erotic behind the social, and remake those gestures into a dance that would confront their conditioning and, as well, relay the multiple fictions the footage suggests (the ‘facts’ forever obscured in the fragments left us). The result is a narrative developed by its periphery, a story like rumor: impossible to trace, disturbing, explosive.”

Part 2 of Two Movies by Mike Kuchar.

Stephen Varble began Journey to the Sun as a series of performances with projected slides in 1978. After becoming notorious for unauthorized costume performances on Soho streets in the mid 1970s, Varble receded from his public persona at this time. Deriving from his identification with his idol, the reclusive actress Greta Garbo, and informed by the spiritual practice of Subud, Varble began writing an allegorical epic about a musician, the Grey Crowned Warbler, who undergoes tribulation and metamorphosis on a journey to transcendence.

In this episode of The Brenda and Glennda Show, Glennda meets up with guest co-host Joan Jett Blakk to discuss Blakk’s 1992 presidential run. The pair interview people on the street outside of the 1992 Democratic Convention. They discuss topics including the police state, weaknesses of the two-party political system, feminism, and political elitism.

Hey Bud revolves around the suicide of Bud Dwyer, a government official who killed himself before a television audience. Zando compares the suicide to a kind of pornographic sex act that plays upon the tension created between exhibitionist and voyeur. It forces viewers to take either an empathetic position vis-a-vis the exhibitionist, or to act as voyeur through release of the repressed desire to see the forbidden face of Death. The piece attempts to understand the power gained through exhibitionism, and how that power is lost through death.

This video was originally part of an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, part of which included the video collaboration Channels of Desire. Recreating coin-operated porno booths, Channels aired one photo image on seven TVs, interrupted only by the viewer inserting a coin and choosing a segment. The concept behind it was the construction of desire in categorical ways, the form of the piece speaking to sexual desire as something that is constantly evading the viewer. The images presented women’s experiences with interracial, lesbian, and heterosexual encounters.

“The video is an extension of Derrick’s project for Headmaster No. 8. The issue is thematically structured around the Village People, and he was given a cop-themed assignment. More specifically, he was asked to consider the importance of the uniform in relation to authority. At the time, the editors had no idea that Derrick would soon be involved in a late-night altercation with the Chicago PD after leaving a gay bar, or that he would reconnect with a boyhood friend, now a police officer, that he hadn’t seen in many years.

A girl with a bad habit of falling for older women befriends a boy lover. This video is an examination of relationships between adults and teenagers. It involves ice cream trucks and bowie knives.

This high octane drama that I made with my students at the San Francisco Art Institute chronicles the moral decline of it's heroine, as the love of a man she obsesses over drives her over something else: a cliff into hell.  It's a free fall all the way to the bottom destination, and there's a heck of a lot of nice looking, young people along for the ride.

LYNDALE is a story of shifting family dynamics, told through the relationship of two brothers. Shot on ten different video formats, this experimental documentary is both the story of a Chicago family, and a record of the digital revolution in the early 2000s. The piece takes place over a six-year period during which filmmakers Oli Rodriguez and Victoria Stob shared a house with Rodriguez’s brother, Jeff.

In Takeover of the Empire State Building, Brenda and Glennda visit the top of the Empire State Building as it is lit up in lavender for Gay Pride. They interview both tourists visiting the building, and activists who have come to see the lights. Ultimately, they question whether this gesture is adequate, or if there is still a way to go until equality is achieved.

Benning gives a chronology of her crushes and kisses, tracing the development of her nascent sexuality. Addressing the camera with an air of seduction and romance, giving the viewer a sense of her anxiety and special delight as she came to realize her lesbian identity.

This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 1.

Sirrocco was a drag performer and club icon in Cincinnati, Ohio during the 1980s and 1990s, and was also a close neighbor and friend of Teramana’s. In a series of short interviews, Sirrocco talks about visiting her hometown in Kentucky, hormone therapy, and dating as a transgender woman. 

In a version of the “teenage diary,” Benning places her feelings of confusion and depression alongside grisly tales from tabloid headlines and brutal events in her neighborhood. The difficulty of finding a positive identity for oneself in a world filled with violence is starkly revealed by Benning’s youthful but already despairing voice.

This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 1.

Set in a campy western mining town, Stinkhorn tells the tale of a lady blacksmith named Dusty and her naughty trickster paramour, Blaze. At night Blaze turns Dusty’s apprentices into horses and rides them all night long, Finally, Cassidy, the clever apprentice hatches a plan. A psychedelic trip wrapped in a queer western, Stinkhorn is a magical who-rides-who tale with a twist. Combining live action, drawings, miniatures and animation, Stinkhorn is the second story in, Fairy Fantastic!, a gender diverse folk and fairy tale series.

Shot in black and white Super 8, this lyrical short follows a wandering, disengaged youth through grey afternoons. German Song features the hard-edged music of Come, an alternative band from Boston.

Transexual Menace takes its title from the name of "the most exciting political action group in the USA"—transgendered people who are defining themselves, demanding their legal rights, and fighting for medical care and against job discrimination. Considered by von Praunheim to be the “most fascinating [project] in my long life as a filmmaker,” Transexual Menace is a sensitive and carefully crafted portrait that deals with issues openly and honestly. “I was able to earn the trust of many who are often reluctant to be interviewed.

Take a trip into and out of the body to ponder Time’s endless depths where Earth spirits roam and inner Demons lurk, and find secrets that hide behind the "self". Its here for you to see.

This title comprises Moon Lit Vows (2017), Boy in the Mirror (2015), Celestial Horizons (2019), Book of the Angel (2017) and Floating on the Currents of Consciousness (2019) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

Bar hopping in the City of Angels.

An exploration of cruising glory holes, feminism, and general queer frustration.