Amplify
1
March, 2003
(15 min)
The film is set in an Italian restaurant, and focuses on a party of three women and the waiter. Scenes unfold, tension mounts and the liberal social setting is threatened into destabilisation.
In the restaurant scene, I have taken a familiar social situation and then accentuated actions and events that lead to hyperbolical results. The use of black humour through obscene and absurd behaviour is key in this production. My intentions are to integrate difference into scenes that fluctuate and hover between disparate themes. The viewer has a rare glimpse of an alternative take on physical difference.
Amplify 2
March, 2003
(2 min. 27 sec)
The video highlights the absurdity of people’s reactions to, and assumptions about, physical difference and sexual orientation. The film centres around the actions of three women and is shot from a female perspective thus replacing the male dominant gaze of classical cinema. Disempowerment of disabled people is something I have always been acutely aware of, and through my work, I find ways of subverting this. People’s attitudes and behaviour should not be dictated by physical difference, but it is. I depict disability along side other kinds of difference (e.g. sexual orientation).
Feb. 2003
(approx. 40 secs.)
Low tech short, experimenting with sound and movement, using kitsch digital effects to objectify the subject into a mediated self portrait.
Restriction
2002
(approx. 2 mins.)
The sexual connotations of the abstract imagery explore issues around gender and female masturbation. Conceptually, I am responding to a lack of discourse around disability and female sexuality within contemporary art. The lack of movement of the doll is a reference to restricted movement or no movement. The masked face with human eyes plays with movement and sound, demonstrating that minute movement can become stimulating and subversive.
Inflate is practised within some loosely set parameters which included working within the limitations of the frame. The actors steer away from a conventional narrative and are autonomous within the space and each other. The actions are improvised to a sound-track, which in turn stimulated the tone of the piece. In this film I do not exploit difference but attempt to use difference as a tool to destabilise traditional ideologies of normality and otherness. In the Inflate video, there is a ritualistic undertone, which distracts the viewer from the subjects.
