Gone

Gone is a two-channel installation based on the second episode of An American Family — the landmark PBS verité documentary about the Loud Family of Santa Barbara, California. Dougherty has created a free-form variation on the theme of parental visits to wayward queer children by mapping the dialogue and plot onto a contemporary community of artists and writers in New York today, paying homage to the art underground and the city itself.

“Dougherty tests new limits of digital video technologies in her latest work. Partially a re-staging of one episode from ’70s proto-reality-TV series An American Family, Gone presents elaborate and intricate new possibilities for narrative through the use of double-screen projection, evoking complex themes of nostalgia, history, memory and loss. Pixelated, popping with lush colors, and elaborately sound designed, Gone recombines low fidelity with high concept to create a unique vision of inner and outer life on the margins of culture.”

— New York Underground Film Festival (2001)

 "Proving Godard's dictum that the best way to critique a film is to make another film, Cecilia Dougherty's double-screen video projection Gone takes as inspiration a key episode from Craig Gilbert's An American Family. Using an all-female cast to re-create the pivotal episode in which mother Loud visits her closeted gay son, the discordant, hauntingly scored, visually impressive Gone counts as one of the most expressive and beautiful uses of video I've seen."

— Andrew Lewis Conn, Film Comment

Gone stars Laurie Weeks, Amy Sillman and Frances Sorensen and features music by Le Tigre and Mike Iveson.

Available as both a dual channel screening version and as an installation.