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Movies Arts and Entertainment

 

Dirges and Sturgeons
Capsule by Fred Camper
From the Chicago Reader

Curator Astria Suparak describes these videos as presenting futuristic or high-tech ideas "in a lo-fi way," and the best entries are both simple and conceptually subtle in their approaches to gender. Pierre Yves Clouin continues to explore the male body in The Little Big (1999), a single take in which a crack that appears to be buttocks in shadow is revealed to be something more erotic. In Lawrence Elbert's Whitney: Mama's Little Baby (2000) a drag queen drinks from a bottle in a paper bag and delivers a solipsistic and rather pathetic monologue to the camera. The theme of self-entrapment is echoed in The Magic Glass (1991), as video maker Bjorn Melhus speaks to his feminized image on a monitor while shaving himself. On the same program, which runs about 58 minutes: work by Jacqueline Goss, Miranda July, Seth Price, and Animal Charm.

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