Film: Dirty Looks: 8 Years On

SPACE is pleased to present Dirty Looks: 8 Years on, a series of short films addressing queer history and identity.

Queer film collective Dirty Looks compiles eight years of experimental screenings for a shorts program of signature delights that queer the pop cannon and (under)mine history for all of her unanswered questions. Ranging from digital drag revisionism to post-bohemian celluloid, Dirty Looks: 8 Years on reassesses the past through a fiercely queer and politicized lens, “who brought us here?” and “where are we now?” Ranging from 16mm films, super8 transfers, Hi8, HD video and Getty stock footage, this DL Cliff’s Notes screening spins circles around contemporary queer subjectivities, snarling with a punk zeal and a utopian demand for more.

Amphetamine, Warren Sonbert + Wendy Appel

Filmed while the artist was still studying at NYU, Amphetamine is a drug-addled portal into 60s bohemian culture by way of impressionistic experimental cinema. Gay druggy sex and The Supremes. The usual.

16mm, B&W, 10 min., 1966

100 Boyfriends Mixtape (the demo), Brontez Purnell

Commissioned by Visual Aids, the uncensored version of Purnell’s “demo” casts the punk musician, author, choreographer and filmmaker as Warhol starlet Edie Sedgwick and occasions to wonder just how much trouble can she get into in one loquacious bathtub phone call.

Super 8 on video, 8min., 2017

Frenzy, Jill Reiter

Recently reconstructed from the original super8 negatives, Reiter’s free-wheeling concert fantasia depicts a Riot Grrrl gig in the desolate warehouse district of Williamsburg (it was the 90s). Frenzy comes on like an attitudinal document of the exploding music scene, where a wanton crowd tears the band apart mid set and a cunnilingus line offers just desserts.

Super 8 on digital video, 12min., 1993 

Poppers, Lila De Magalhaes

A promo video for the single from Xina Xurner’s debut album, Die. In Poppers, band members Young Joon Kwak and Marvin Astorga conjure an orgiastic Ophelia in the back of a Toyota flat bed, with the help of their Mutant Salon crew.

video, 5min., 2013

Onward Lossless Follows, Michael Robinson

An oblique and suggestive rumination on a lovers discourse in the socio-digital/doomsday age, Robinson’s newest video overloads disparate signifiers to depict how text exchanges construct emotional space. Is this a new, borderless frontier for communication, or did we just ditch the password, allowing for yet another psychical kidnap?

HD video, 17min., 2017

Liberaceón, Chris E. Vargas

Liberace died in February of 1987. The following month ACT UP was formed. In Vargas’ humorous digital drag reenactment, the artist suggests reparative measures for this rather problematic queer icon. What if the activist organization was founded on account of this dying man’s cri de ceour?

SD video, 13min., 2011

tongue job, Aimee Goguen

Combining grainy, Hi8 video with experimental animation and ominous sound design, Aimee Goguen’s videos depict the artist and friends in fraternal playroom hazings, displaced erotic games that test the limits of intimacy and bodily functions when the task at hand is pushed a touch too far.

Hi8 on SD video, 4min., 2013

Encounters I May or May Not Have Had, Mariah Garnett

In Garnett’s 16mm evocation of a queer porn star, the artist drifts through three unlikely scenarios for iconographic reflection. Posing, projecting and documenting all have their representational pitfalls in this hypothetical artistic union.

 with Peter Berlin, 16mm, 15min., 2012

Follow Dirty Looks on Instagram: @_dirtylooks_