Tag: feminism

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“No More Sweets For You” at Light Industry

Curated by Elisabeth Subrin

Tuesday, April 15, 2025 at 7pmLight Industry, 361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

German Song, Sadie Benning, 1995, digital projection, 6 mins
An Epic: Falling Between the Cracks, Nancy Andrews, 1995, digital projection, 6 minsTrue Confessions of an Artist, Kirsten Stoltmann, 1994, digital projection, 5 mins 
The Fight, Jeanine Oleson, 1995, digital projection, 3 mins
Sapphire and the Slave Girl, L. Franklin Gilliam, 1995, digital projection, 17 mins
I, Bear, Hendl Helen Mirra, 1995, digital projection, 6 mins
Dear Mom, Tammy Rae Carland, 1995, digital projection, 3 mins
aletheia, Tran T. Kim-Trang, 1992, digital projection, 16 mins
Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron), Cauleen Smith, 1992, 16mm, 6 mins
The Girl’s Nervy, Jennifer Reeves, 1995, 16mm, 5 mins
My Failure to Assimilate, Cecilia Dougherty, 1995, digital projection, 20 mins

Presented with Video Data Bank

Video still, My Failure to Assimilate
Video still from My Failure to Assimilate, by Cecilia Dougherty, 1995

The program:
In 1995, after the rise of Third Wave feminism but before the social and political realignments of the internet, artistElisabeth Subrin organized a screening of films and videos entitled No More Sweets For You. The program firstshowed at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, then toured to Hallwalls in Buffalo and the MIX festival in NewYork City. Though each lineup differed, many of the core offerings were by American women who, like Subrinherself, were under 30. Seen today, it reveals a rich (and still, in many ways, underappreciated) vein of feministexperimental cinema at the end of the 20th century.

The works concern thwarted connections and, as Subrin put it at the time, “the fantasies, trauma andschizophrenia of solo-ness,” but the program also suggests an intensely collaborative milieu. Its artists wereassociated in numerous ways—as colleagues or lovers or friends—and traces of these relationships can be seenin the credits: Tammy Rae Carland appears as an interviewee in Cecilia Dougherty’s video, Subrin and KirstenStoltmann worked on Franklin Gilliam’s tape; and in turn Gilliam, Stoltmann, and Sadie Benning were involvedwith the production of Subrin’s own Swallow, completed that same year and featured in the original program. 

Unlike boomer feminist celebrations of community and sisterhood, the screening is haunted by the specter offailure and figures of isolation. Consider the wandering latchkey kid of Benning’s German Song, the Nauman-eque artiste depicted in Kirsten Stoltmann’s Confessions, or the mop-haired child subject of Hendl Helen Mirra’s I,Bear. Nowhere are film or video employed as simple tools of communication; both celluloid and electronic imagesare likewise approached as malleable, tactile forms, made visually complex through multiple layers ofremediation: documents collaged and animated, videos re-taped off monitors, images scratched, frozen, andpainted-over. The viewer can sense lone psyches wrestling with the crises of their day, in the cellular isolation of alate-night editing suite. Identities are metabolized by, and drift between, a range of audiovisual formats andprocesses, including Super-8, manually-edited 16mm, analog video, Pixelvision, and digital effects.

With a typically Gen-X dialectical ambivalence, these artists collectively argue that isolation can simultaneouslyfoster both mental destabilization and social resistance. “In an era of corporate grunge, queer commodification,empowerment politics and right-wing cyborgs,” Subrin asks in her original program notes, “how do theunassimilated survive without being smashed, named or forced to participate?” The answer provided by No MoreSweets for You: it’s personal, it’s deep, and it’s complicated. 

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Leaders lead, twits tweet

Even though I use Twitter the most of any social media, the sign below was my favorite yesterday as me and 400,000 other people walked up New York’s Fifth Ave for the Women’s March.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First off, the ride on the Staten Island Ferry over to Manhattan had a number of small groups of people going to the Women’s March, which for Staten Island, New York’s only Republican borough, is very fine.  Right off the ferry and onto the No. 6 train, which was crowded with marchers. Festive atmosphere all around. The scene getting off the train and emerging into Grand Central was even better,  like this:

with wall to wall marchers. I don’t often congratulate Men As A Group, but you guys did well, showing up in large numbers. Could say “thanks!” but honestly if you’re doing it for one so-called-group (‘women’ btw are NOT a ‘group’, we are what you’d call HUMANS), you’re doing it for everyone, including yourselves.

Once on the street just outside GCT, it looked like this:

and then as we marched, people were really determined to keep this momentum going, some were in a party mood, and some like me still fearful because our president doesn’t know how to be a public servant and may completely tank not only the economy, the environment, women’s rights, voter’s rights, immigrant rights, freedoms of religion and belief, and our healthcare access,  but the democracy itself. 

STAY INVOLVED.