Cheryl Donegan

Practisse

Cheryl Donegan

To the accompaniment of the only extant recording of James Joyce reading from his own work, Donegan uses a clear cellophane hood and a pane of glass to create another of her "face paintings." The performance is intercut with the artist painting over her own image as it appears on a video monitor, complicating the relation between her performance and the ways that technology both records and redefines the artist's work.

Craft

Cheryl Donegan

Donegan eats her way layer by iconic layer through a white bread and KRAFT American Cheese sandwich — crafting hearts, stars, faces and bunnies as she goes. Through a strategic use of close-ups and an aggressive rock n'roll soundtrack, Donegan ironically probes the auto-eroticism inherent in the production and consumption of the "art object" in contemporary America.

Emma's Dilemma

Henry Hills

Emma Bee Bernstein, Carolee Schneemann

Henry Hills’s Emma’s Dilemma reinvents the portrait for the age of digital reproduction. In a set of tour-de-force probes into the images and essences of such downtown luminaries as Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, and Carolee Schneemann, Hills’s cinematic inventions literally turn the screen upside down and inside out. In this epic journey into the picaresque, we follow Emma Bee Bernstein, our intrepid protagonist, from her pre-teen innocence to her late teen-attitude, as she learns about the downtown art scene firsthand. In the process, Hills reimagines the art of video in a style that achieves the density, complexity, and visual richness of his greatest films.

Head

Cheryl Donegan

Cheryl Donegan

Milk pours from a plastic container into a woman's mouth. The woman swallows it, dribbles it back at the container, and spits it out.

Kiss My Royal Irish Ass (K.M.R.I.A.)

Cheryl Donegan

In this documentation of a performance at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Donegan uses her body as an art-making tool, and toys with identity politics as well.

Cellardoor

Cheryl Donegan

Life as seen through the lens of a plastic bottle.

Channeling

Cheryl Donegan

Juxtaposing two restagings of a melodramatic scene from Tommy, The Who's rock opera, Channeling analyzes the ways in which media cannibalizes, revises, and resurrects itself. In Donegan's almost psychedelic renditions, a silver-garbed, red-wigged performer capers in a theatrical non-space of foil, plastic, police tape, and rescanned video images of Tommy star Ann-Margret. In Channeling in 4 Versions, actress Garland Hunter enacts the scene, and then, in a silent version (Channeling in 5 Versions), Donegan herself takes the role.

Vine

Cheryl Donegan

A series of videos put together and updated regularly until Vine closed.

File

Cheryl Donegan

Scraps of color and pattern slide across the screen in a stop and start progression that frustrates all sense of spatiality and depth. David Schafer's delirious soundtrack adds to the disorientation.

Cheryl

Cheryl Donegan

Presenting "Cheryl" the home-shopping motivator as a surrogate and cheesy consumer goods as art objects, Cheryl the artist questions hype and material value in a personality-driven art market.

Artists + Models

Cheryl Donegan

In this black and white performance tape, Donegan continues her ironic exploration of the process of making art. Working within the format of a music video, Donegan plays with notions of artist and model, subject and object, and the "painterly gesture."

Flushing

Cheryl Donegan

Shot at the Flushing Mall in Queens, New York, "Flushing" is tour of a mall that doesn't live up to the glossy standards of typical American consumer palaces, but is thereby, perhaps a better place to understand the yearnings for fantasy via retailing.

Alive! Artist! Model! Pleasure!

Cheryl Donegan

Donegan calls into question the institutional armature that surrounds a work of art, and investigates boundaries between "high" and "low" culture.

Refuses

Cheryl Donegan

After Caroline Bergvall's poem "FUSES (after Carolee Schneemann)" after Carolee Schneeman's film "Fuses".

Whoa Whoa Studio (for Courbet)

Cheryl Donegan

This film refracts Donegan's earlier performance work through the lens of a studio art practice. The artist subverts the tradition of studio painting by using a computer to make simple line drawings. Later, the computer is transformed into a canvas through the regressive act of directly marking the monitor. Painting is related to scatology as a correlation is made between art making and infantile fantasy.

Scenes and Commercials

Cheryl Donegan

A recording of the Wilson Brothers trying to cut the single "Help Me Rhonda" under the overbearing scrutiny of father Murray, tells the story of the struggle to achieve the illusion of carefree, American fun.