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Blood and Guts in High School

Laura Parnes

2007 00:50:27 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3
Tags:
Feminism, History, Installation, Politics, Youth/Childhood

Description

Blood and Guts in High School features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations* that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker's book of the same title. The book received noteriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes' interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by U.S. news events from the time period in which the book was written. These events saturate the character's daily experience, informing her adolescent, nihilistic worldview and her desire for rebellion. As the viewer looks back at pivotal historical events (Jonestown Massacre, Moral Majority, Three Mile Island, etc.) connections are drawn in relation to our current political situation.

"Shot with an hallucination Kubrickian eye, Blood and Guts brings a sleek cinematic esthetic to the often ineptly-lensed genre of gallery video, and offers the form a new role: as Hollywood's unconscious, peeping into the nightmare from which we cannot awake."

--Ed Halter, Village Voice critic writing for Cinematexas

*This is a single-channel version available for screening rental or educational purchase. For inquiries regarding installation version, please contact us.

About Laura Parnes

Laura Parnes’ critically acclaimed moving image works and installations address counter-cultural and youth-culture references where music is integral to the work. Her work engages in strategies of narrative and experimental film and video art to craft loose narratives of trauma and repressed memory around mass-culture experiences and youthful rites of passage. Using historical, literary and popular culture based references she addresses issues related to cultural production and societal malaise.

Laura Parnes has screened and exhibited her work widely in the US and internationally, including Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; LOOP Festival, Barcelona, Spain; Light Industry, Brooklyn, NY; Kusthalle Winterhur, Switzerland; Overgaden- Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; iMOCA, Indianapolis, IN; Cinematexas, Austin, TX; Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania; Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Whitney Museum of American Art (1997 Whitney Biennial), NY; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, New Zealand; PSI Contemporary Art Center MoMA, NY; Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, FL; and Brooklyn Museum, NY.

Her solo exhibitions include; LA><Art, LA, CA; Alma Enterprises, London; Locust Projects, Miami; Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, LA; Participant Inc, NY and Deitch Projects, NY. She has had solo screenings at MoMA, NY; CATE 10-year Anniversary, presented by the School of Art Institute of Chicago and Video Data Bank, Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago IL; Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Vtape, Toronto and in a two-person screening at MoMA, NY. She was presented by Participant Inc. in a two-person exhibition at No Soul for Sale at X Initiative, NYC, NY.

Parnes is a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow and has lectured as a visiting artist at numerous institutions including: Harvard University, Columbia University and UCLA. She has participated in panels at Yale University, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and MoMA PSI. Parnes has held teaching positions at New York University, The New School and Bennington College. In 2012 she was a visiting critic at Yale University. She is currently teaching at graduate programs at MICA, Parsons and SVA. She received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University.