“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. 

Queerness! Portraits of…

Portraits of Queerness Film Series at the College of Staten Island

Friday, March 28, 2025, 2:30 – 9:00 PM
Center for Performing & Creative Arts, Building 1P

Screening that day of my 2002 video portrait of Kevin Killian and Cedar Sigo, titled
Kevin and Cedar.

video still from my 2002 video titled Kevin and Cedar
video still, Kevin & Cedar, 2002

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.

Thread Waxing Space presents Cecilia Dougherty

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.

A found ticket to a 1998 screening of work by Cecilia Dougherty at Thread Waxing Space, a gallery on lower Broadway in New York run by Lia Gangitano. The precursor to Participant, Inc., Lia's current gallery.

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.


Cyland Media Art Laboratory Picks up my Cyber Art for Distribution and Archiving

Drawing from interactive fiction by Cecilia Dougherty based on drawing of a mammoth from El Castillo paleolithic site in Spain.

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.

From their website: https://videoarchive.cyland.org/

CYLAND VIDEO ARCHIVE
International Digital Online Archive

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. 

CYFEST 13, St. Petersburg, 2021

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!

Find Drift here: https://drift.ceciliadougherty.com/

Ride

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.

Click the link below!

Ride is here.


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.