Videoworks of Sadie Benning. Volume 3

A collection of three remarkable works by Sadie Benning produced between 1995-1998 including German Song, The Judy Spots and Flat is Beautiful. Shot in black and white Super-8 film, Benning’s lyrical short muses on a disengaged youth and grey afternoons spent wandering, and features the hard-edged music of Come, an alternative band from Boston. The Judy Spots is a tape composed of five episodes featuring Judy, a teenage girl puppet made of papiermache as she plays in a band, works at a fast food restaurant, shops at the mall and feels scared at night. Flat is Beautiful is an experimental, live-action cartoon narrative 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.