. Conversations at the Edge (CATE)

LAURA PARNES’S BLOOD AND GUTS IN HIGH SCHOOL

Posted by | Jessica Bardsley | Posted on | September 25, 2011

Thursday, September 29, 6:00 pm | Laura Parnes in person!

Parnes_BloodandGuts
Image from Blood and Guts in High School (Laura Parnes, 2004-06). Courtesy the artist.

Laura Parnes’s bracingly inventive, stylized films and videos operate at the intersection of narrative film and video art. This evening, Parnes will present her acclaimed feature, Blood and Guts in High School (2004-06). Distilled from Kathy Acker’s subversive feminist novel of the same title, the film interweaves events surrounding the book’s publication — the Jonestown Massacre, Three Mile Island, the rise of Reagan Republicanism and the Moral Majority — with interludes from the short, violent life of its pre-teen protagonist, Janie Smith. Parnes will also screen episodes from her new web series, County Down (ongoing). Building on the darkly comic spirit of Blood and Guts, County Down is set in a lavish gated community where parents suddenly prey upon their children. Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. Laura Parnes, 2004-11, USA, multiple formats, ca. 75 min plus discussion.

Artist LAURA PARNES (b. 1968, Buffalo, New York) has screened and exhibited her work widely in the US and internationally, including Light Industry, New York, NY; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; the Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand; the Institute for Contemporary Art /P.S. 1 Museum, New York, NY; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Galizia, Vigo, Spain; Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Lake Worth, FL; the Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; and on PBS and Spanish Television. Her work has been featured in solo shows at Alma Enterprises, London; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Upstream Gallery, Amsterdam; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles; Participant Inc, New York, NY; Deitch Projects, New York, NY; and in a two-person screening at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. She is currently a Faculty Lecturer in the graduate department at Yale University School.

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Laura Parnes’s website