United States of America
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.
Over the last three decades, Sadie Benning has made work that ranges from lo-fi, experimental videos exploring queer sexuality and identity to large, wall-mounted works that suggest a constant slippage between abstraction and representation, sound and image, sculpture and painting, motion and stillness, colour and its absence. The diversity of Sadie’s practice reflects the artist’s ongoing interest in ambiguity and in-between-ness.
https://www.vdb.org/artists/sadie-benning
