317 E. Houston St., New York City, Tuesday, May 5, 7:30 PM, doors open at 7 PM.
Screening of my Writers Series of intimate video portraits. The works include Joe, 2018, with Joe Westmoreland; Kevin and Cedar, 2002, with Kevin Killian and Cedar Sigo; Eileen, 2000, with Eileen Myles; Lesie, 1998, with Leslie Scalapino; and Laurie, 1998, with Laurie Weeks. Total running time is about 45 minutes. I love these writers!
Afterwards, I’m discussing the videos with Lia Gangitano, excellent curator and gallerist at Participant Inc. in NYC, who has been showing my work since 1998, with a several-day screening event at Threadwaxing Space in lower Manhattan.
Lia Gangitano, photo by A. Steiner
Ann Stephenson, who curates the Readings at Parkside series was generous enough to ask about the Writers Series. This is the first time they will have all been screen together. Thank you, Ann!
The Parkside Lounge is a neighborhood bar with music and events venue in the back room. It has a friendly neighborhood vibe. People of all ages and stripes enjoying a pint, enjoying each other’s company, attending readings by contemporary greats, and now, there’s a video screening! I look forward to seeing you there.
With the Herto skull at the Education Center, Hall of Human Origins. Photo by Jamie Chan.
On weekend visits to the Natural History Museum here in NYC (the AMNH), you can go to a room off to the side of the main exhibit in the Hall of Human Origins and see and touch replicas of the skulls of all types of Hominins (upright-walking apes, like us). I’m holding a replica of the Herto skull from Ethiopia, aged at 160,000+ years. An early Homo sapiens type of person who had brow ridges. Brow ridges were to eventually disappear, but some have a theory that they may be a hold-over from a % of Neanderthal DNA that they, as modern people, carry in there genetic structure. I’m not sure about the Neanderthal origin of brow ridges in H. sapiens, however, since Herto and other early sapiens, such as the skull found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, had brow ridges as well, and being discovered in Africa, where Neanderthals rarely ventured, sapiens brow ridges may indicate a non-Neanderthal origin of brow ridges in people today.
Speaking of which, I was looking for an image of a Homo erectus skullcap and brow ridges online, because I guessed wrong at the model available at the AMNH and realized how little I know about early humans. Here’s the skull I mistakenly thought belonged to a Paranthropus individual:
But obviously, it has a rounded brain case, indicating that it is a Homo specimen. I have a lot of learning to do, but fortunately, all of the learning I have yet to do is fun and interesting.
The image search for the erectus skullcap and brow ridges above, led to a whole other place: plastic surgery and facial reconstruction to remove brow ridges, to smooth them out, in people who would like a smoother and more anatomically modern human brow. Here are some before and after images of people who have had surgery done. I always prefer the “before,” since the “Neanderthal” or archaic part of us is appealing, attractive, and interesting:
Brow ridges, before and after surgery
Before and after brow ridge surgery
Before- and after- images of someone who has had brow-ridge surgery
So, yes, there’s always something surprising going on that gives the tug of war between our Neanderthal and Homo sapiens genes momentum. As stated above, I prefer the brow ridges to the smooth and egg-shaped new facial construction.
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
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.
But my film only ran for half of it! There was an error with the projection. I created a teaching moment, however, and showed Kevin and Cedar to my Cinematography class with a description of how the piece came about. I was in San Francisco and had arranged to shoot a portrait of him, as one of my series of writers’ portraits that I had been doing, so far with Laurie Weeks, Leslie Scalapino, and Eileen Myles. When I got to Kevin and Dodie Bellamy‘s apartment, Cedar was there, having just then arrived in San Francisco from Washington State. We decided to have the portrait be a double-portrait with Kevin and Cedar together. Here’s a link to the other videos in my writers’ series > https://vimeo.com/channels/ceciliadougherty.
Nov 13, 1998. There was a 3-day event at Thread Waxing Space to screen my video works to date. The event was packed, sold out, standing room only for all three screenings.
Thread Waxing Space was a non-profit (not-for-profit?) gallery in lower Manhattan that operated from 1994 to 2001.
I remember seeing a great show there once about architecture, including the work of the Archigram collective. The gallery had given a lot of space to architectural models of fantasy scenarios in that show – whole communities living in the air, buildings like bubbles, transport like effortless movement in space. This was a great gallery with smart shows.
I wore my new Adidas cropped blue jacket to one of my screenings. The jacket is the only one of its kind that I have ever seen, and was made in Paris. I wore jeans, boots and a studded belt with it. I still have the jacket.
Three web-based pieces: Time Before Memory (Interactive Fiction 2019), Drift (interactive photo essay, 2020), and my newest piece, Shanidar, Safe Return (Interactive Fiction, 2023). These works are viewable on my website and are now a part of an international collection of web-based works.
The CYLAND Video Archive (since 2008) is one of the first systematized online video art platform of its kind: most of the works gathered here are accessible for view on the internet at the archive website.
The idea to make video art works and films open for the public viewing online comes from the beginning. It was a very progressive thing to demonstrate and promote video art online and to have this exchange between classic and young artists and to make an international networking platform. CYLAND Video Archive is a great information and educational resource. Each year the Cyland Video Archive produces an international competition video art program for the CYFEST media art festival.
One of the tasks of the archive is to build an open and accessible collection, to protect works of art from being locked in private collections, and to prevent their technical basis from becoming outdated. The archive is structured in two parts: videos on the website with open access (artists personal pages), and the offline collection for professionals accessible at the archive office. Currently, the collection comprises over 600 videos from different countries. The collection includes video art, experimental films, computer graphics, 3D animation, stop-motion animation, poetic video, video documentation of art and education projects on cutting-edge technologies.
The show was in November, 2021, before all hell broke loose. And the catalogue just came out, June 2022.
Image from the CYFEST 13 catalogue showing gallery installation of my web-based essay , “Drift”
Cecilia Dougherty (USA) DRIFT web-based art, 2020
“Drift” tells the story of a walk the artist took in March, 2020, along the North Shore of Staten Island, NY, just as it was beginning to dawn on people that leisurely strolls might be a bad idea at the present moment. The project was created using basic HTML/CSS coding, and the images were taken with an iPhone. The artist takes a final stroll through favorite parts of her neighborhood before lockdown.
Descriptions of the surroundings and a chronicle of events of the pandemic are mixed with critical thoughts on virus capitalism, such as the experience of resisting the virus in the USA and the inaction of the Trump administration.
I like the way my piece, Drift, is displayed – it’s a good size – not gigantic and not tiny, and it’s at a height and an angle that looks pretty accessible to me. Thank you, CYFEST!
The ferry, the bus, the subway. Walk, too. Walk around the neighborhood in the early morning hours, especially, when few people are up and about and you can occasionally take off your mask and enjoy the air, the colors of dawn, and the fragrance of the fall.
Announcing the launch of my new web-based essay, RIDE, about what it feels like being in public and being on public transit in New York. A complete environment for daydreaming, people-watching, and finding your place, your role, in the city.
