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Hollywood Inferno (Episode One)

Laura Parnes

2001 00:38:17 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Body, Consumer culture, Performance, Visual Art, Youth/Childhood

Description

Parnes moves further into her interrogation of horror genres and the art world, with their sometimes over-lapping cults of personality. Grappling with the danger of beauty without criticality, Hollywood Inferno takes the viewer through the alienating world of a teenager named Sandy, a modern-day Dante, and follows where her aspirations toward stardom lead her.

“Parnes’ video advances the other, much darker view—that sex and self-expression are the ultimate commodities, and things don’t always work out so nicely for the youthquake in our alienated, violent land. … Parnes’ anger rivals Dante’s—or at the very least, Todd Solondz’s—in her description of affectless youth selling itself down the river, with only Satan (in various guises) serving as an adult role model.” —Tom Moody, Digital Media Tree, http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/?20467 (20 January 2003)

"The performances under Ms. Parnes’s direction are funny, raunchy and skillfully maladroit. The dialogue, sleazy and fatuous, may even sound familiar: much of it is excerpted from "found" sources, including A Clockwork Orange, a George Lucas interview and the writings of a crypto-conservative art critic. Ms Parnes, who has a smart, notably unconservative critical eye, is now at work on her first feature film. I look forward to it." -Holland Cotter, The New York Times

Note: Hollywood Inferno (Episode One) is also available as a two-channel installation. 

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.