Sadie Benning
| Sadie Benning | |
|---|---|
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| Background information | |
| Born | April 11, 1973 |
| Origin | American |
| Occupation(s) | Video Maker, Visual Artist, Musician |
| Associated acts | Le Tigre |
Sadie Benning (born April 11, 1973) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, US is an American video and visual artist. A 2005 Guggenheim Fellow, Benning has repeated throughout the body of their work the themes of masculinity vs. femininity and the challenges of being young.
Benning was raised by her mother in inner-city Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She left school at age 16, primarily due to the homophobia she experienced. She started filming with the "toy" video camera she received from her father, a film making teacher.
Benning began creating visual works at age 15. She used a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera, the Fisher-Price PXL-2000 which was a Christmas gift from her father, the experimental filmmaker James Benning.
At first, she was standoffish to the PixelVision camera which recorded pixelated, black and white video images onto standard audio cassettes. Benning is quoted as saying, "I thought, 'This is a piece of shit. It's black-and-white. It's for kids. He'd told me I was getting this surprise. I was expecting a camcorder." Her first mysterious video was in a film festival when still a teenager.
The majority of Benning's shorts combined performance, experimental narrative, handwriting, and cut-up music to explore, among other subjects, gender and sexuality. Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial on three occasions.
Benning's earlier videos – A New Year[1], Living Inside, Me and Rubyfruit, Jollies, and If Every Girl Had a Diary - used Benning's isolated surroundings and the effect this had on Benning as the main focus. In Benning's earliest work, A New Year, Benning shied away from being in front of the camera, using her surroundings – primarily the confines of their room and their bedroom window – to portray their feelings of angst, confusion and alienation. "I don't talk, I'm not physically in it, it's all handwritten text, music; I wanted to substitute objects, things that were around me, to illustrate the events. I used objects in the closest proximity – the television, toys, my dog, whatever."
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