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Feathers: An Introduction

Barbara Aronofsky Latham

1978 00:25:00 United StatesEnglishColor
Tags:
Autobiography, Family, Feminism, Image Processing, Performance, Video History

Description

Feathers: An Introduction is a self-portrait centered on the story of Latham's grandmother’s comforter which, old and worn, scatters feathers everywhere. Displaying an arresting stage presence, Latham addresses the viewer as a potential friend or lover, speaking in a soft-spoken near-whisper, and gingerly touching and kissing the camera lens and monitor. Then, almost mocking the video’s intimacy, Latham gives us close-ups of herself chewing a sandwich and shaving her armpits, heightening the sense that she has been playing cat and mouse with the viewer all along. Despite the work’s casual and playful tone, and the use of familiar domestic props and settings, Feathers is carefully structured to keep the audience at a distance.

This title is also available on Barbara Latham Videoworks: Volume 1 and I Say I Am: Program 1.

About Barbara Aronofsky Latham

During the late 1970s and early 80s, Barbara Latham produced a substantial body of work that innovatively meshed the formal concerns of video with autobiographical, narrative, and political content. Dedicated to furthering video art and challenging its reputation as an inaccessible, esoteric field, Latham was on the board of directors at Chicago's Center for New Television, and was influential in shaping policy that served the needs of independent producers. She was also a strong advocate of politically-involved video work and, through her own work, explored issues related to female identity, such as the political significance of women’s personal histories.

Often producing collaboratively, Latham worked against the hierarchical delineation of roles that characterizes standard video and television production.  Her belief in the active construction of identity is conveyed in her use of fragmented and manipulated images as a metaphor for lived experience. For example, in Arbitrary Fragments, Latham speaks of herself as a gypsy storyteller weaving fact and fiction in an unreliable mixture that, for her, signals the free play of autobiography. Consuming Passions speaks to the "unification of personal identity", the creation of a sense of self, falsely constructed through the activity of shopping and eating. Latham was head of the video department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1978 until her untimely death in 1984.