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22 Earth and Elsewhere | Contemporary Works from the Collection
Earth and Elsewhere | Contemporary Works from the Collection 23
Sadi e Benning
Girl Power (part 1)
1990,
A Place Called Lovely
1991–92,
It Wasn’t Love
1992
Sadie Benning began creating videos at the age of 15 using a toy
PixelVision camera. In these early works, she documented her
inner life as an adolescent and the development of her identity
as a lesbian. In
Girl power (part 1)
, Benning recalls her rebellion
against school, family and female stereotypes as a quest for
personal freedom, juxtaposing images of traditional feminine
stereotypes with those of radical independence and alternative
sexual identities. Benning’s
A place called lovely
represents
layers of violence, from physical harm to psychological trauma,
for which she collected images of socially pervasive threats from
a variety of sources, including mass media and electronic images,
to children’s games. In
It wasn’t love
, Benning illustrates a lustful
encounter with a ‘bad girl’ through the gender posturing and genre
interplay of Hollywood stereotypes. Isolating and conflating
various identities within the conventions of the ‘star’ system,
she deconstructs facets of physical attraction, including fear,
violence, lust, guilt and abandonment.
Sadie Benning
/ United States b.1973 /
It Wasn’t Love
(still) 1992 / PixelVision video transferred to SD video, black and white, mono, 20 minutes
Sadie Benning videoworks, vol.2
1991–92 / Digital Betacam, black and white, mono, 35 minutes, uneditioned / Acc. 1996.117 / Purchased 1996 with a special allocation
from the Queensland Government. Celebrating the Queensland Art Gallery’s Centenary 1895–1995