Benning gives a chronology of her crushes and kisses, tracing the development of her nascent sexuality. Addressing the camera with an air of seduction and romance, giving the viewer a sense of her anxiety and special delight as she came to realize her lesbian identity.
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.