When she was 16, Benning stopped going to high school for three weeks and stayed inside with her camera, her TV set, and a pile of dirty laundry. This tape mirrors her psyche during this time. With the image breaking up between edits, the rough quality of this early tape captures Benning’s sense of isolation and sadness, her retreat from the world. As such, Living Inside is the confession of a chronic outsider.
This title is also available on Sadie Benning Videoworks: Volume 1.
Sadie Benning began making videos at 15-years old, using a Fisher Price Pixelvision toy camera. Benning's early works were made in the privacy of their childhood bedroom, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries to record thoughts and images that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity. Evoking in turn playful seduction and painful honesty, Benning’s floating, close-up camera functions as a witness to their intimate revelations, and as an accomplice in defining their evocative experimental form. Sadie's work emerges from a place half-innocent and half-adult — with all the honesty, humor, and desperation of a personality just coming into self-awareness, trapped and uneasy. Their more recent work moves beyond the Pixelvision camera and into animation, film and installation.
Sadie Benning is a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow.