Sadie Benning
Sadie Benning’s career began at 15, when they received a Fisher-Price PXL 2000 toy video camera from their father for Christmas. Benning remembers, “I thought, ‘This is a piece of shit. It’s black-and-white. It’s for kids.’ He’d told me I was getting this surprise. I was expecting a camcorder.”
Reminiscent of journal entries and filmed mostly in their bedroom, the videos Benning created with the PXL 2000 are a window into their teenage world in Milwaukee. The artist acknowledges, “I got started partly because I needed different images and I never wanted to wait for someone to do them for me.” Suddenly, Benning became a pioneer of a new and rapidly popularizing genre of film: Pixelvision, as the videos were coined for their flat, pixilated quality. In Jollies (1990), by describing past sexual and romantic experiences, Benning recounts the path that led them to realize, “I was as queer as can be.” Despite the attention that these movies received, the works were developed at a time, as Benning now reflects, before they fully understood their transgender, nonbinary identity.
Benning eventually began to work in other mediums, embracing the immediacy of tactile materials as an alternative to the long process of filming and editing video. Benning explains that a “painting might not literally have the ability to talk like a film...yet it still has something to say.” They incorporate sculptural elements into their paintings; often, wood is cut into pieces, coated with colored resin, sanded, then fit back together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Benning attributes this experimental process to a lack of formal training as a painter, explaining, “The history of painting is heavy with arguments, and as much as I am interested in knowing about them conceptually, I don't want to feel oppressed in the studio. I want to be free to try things that don’t make sense yet. I put materials together that maybe shouldn’t be and don’t follow hierarchies.”
Benning takes this same approach to Shared Eye (2016); with the addition of found photographs, toys, and shelves, the work has moved even further from traditional painting. Though the work is inspired by things that bother the artist—like the current political climate and how rampant sexism, racism, xenophobia, white supremacy, and capitalism affect the unconscious—Benning also wants audiences to bring their own interpretation to it, noting that there are “infinite ways of looking at the piece.”
By Hannah Traore, Twelve-Month Intern, Department of Painting and Sculpture, 2019
- Introduction
- Sadie T. Benning (born April 11, 1973) is an American artist, who has worked primarily in video, painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and sound. Benning creates experimental films and explores a variety of themes including surveillance, gender, ambiguity, transgression, play, intimacy, and identity. They became a known artist as a teenager, with their short films made with a PixelVision camera that have been described as, "video diaries". Landmarks, the public art program of The University of Texas at Austin, exhibited Girl Power (1993) and archived an essay dedicated to Benning and their work on Landmark's websiteBenning was a co-founder and a former member of the American electronic rock band Le Tigre, from 1998 until 2001.
- Wikidata
- Q448193
- Introduction
- Video artist who explores the issues of self-definition and alienation, often in an autobiographical way. She was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.
- Nationality
- American
- Gender
- Female
- Roles
- Artist, Video Artist
- Name
- Sadie Benning
- Ulan
- 500114576
Exhibitions
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Surrounds: 11 Installations
Oct 21, 2019–Jan 4, 2020
MoMA
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Greater New York
Oct 11, 2015–Mar 7, 2016
MoMA PS1
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Stranger than Fiction: Art of Our Time
Feb 1–May 5, 2014
MoMA
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MoMA Media Lounge
Feb 29, 2012–Jul 8, 2013
MoMA
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The Winter of Love (L'Hiver de l'Amour)
Oct 9, 1994–Jan 8, 1995
MoMA PS1
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Sadie Benning has
6 exhibitionsonline.
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Sadie Benning A New Year 1989
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Sadie Benning Living Inside 1989
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Sadie Benning If Every Girl Had a Diary 1990
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Sadie Benning Jollies 1990
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Sadie Benning Me and Rubyfruit 1990
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Sadie Benning German Song 1995
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Sadie Benning The Judy Spots 1995
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Sadie Benning Flat is Beautiful 1998
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Various Artists, Pawel Althamer, Sadie Benning, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Harrison, Paulina Olowska Parkett no. 82 2008
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Sadie Benning Julie's Rug 2014
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Sadie Benning Shared Eye 2016
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