Lynn Hershman Leeson
Over 30 filmmakers and friends of Strand Releasing have come together to honor the company’s indelible contribution to independent cinema over the past thirty years. The participating filmmakers have each created a short film for the project, all shot on iPhones. Produced by Strand Releasing and Connor Jessup.
VertiGhost, a newly commissioned work by Lynn Hershman Leeson for the Fine Arts Museums, draws the viewer into a meditation about notions of authenticity and the construction of identity. Inspired by the Legion of Honor’s role as a location for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Hershman Leeson explores the tension at the core of Vertigo between the difficulty or lack of desire to distinguish between reality and fiction versus the pursuit of truth. The eponymous ghost of Hershman Leeson’s project is the elusive nature of a singular identity that haunts the characters in the 1958 film, its most enigmatic representation being the painting of a supposed distant relative of the film’s protagonist Madeleine, around which her character and fate is imagined.
In 2015 reknown Cuban artist Tania Bruguera was imprisoned in Havana after advocating for freedom of expression. Shortly after her release she returned to the United States and located Dr. Frank M. Ochberg, the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome. The filmed therapy sessions between them exposes an intimate yet profound analysis of Cuba, surveillance and the politics in of repression embedded in government and family structures.
Through intimate interviews, provocative art, and rare, historical film and video footage, this feature documentary reveals how art addressing political consequences of discrimination and violence, the Feminist Art Revolution radically transformed the art and culture of our times.
Strange Culture is a 2007 documentary film directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson. It stars Tilda Swinton and Thomas Jay Ryan. It premiered January 19, 2007 at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The film examines the case of artist and professor Steve Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). The work of Kurtz and other CAE members dealt with genetically modified food and other issues of science and public policy. After his wife, Hope, died of heart failure, paramedics arrived and became suspicious when they noticed petri dishes and other scientific equipment related to Kurtz's art in his home. They summoned the FBI, who detained Kurtz within hours on suspicion of bioterrorism.
This project uses mixed reality convergence through which users can participate in some of the digital existing archive of Lynn Hershman Leeson, now housed in the Special Collections Library at Stanford University. Created in 2006, this project is one of the first artist archive projects in Second Life and has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Montreal, ISEA and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Emmy Coer, a computer genius, devises a method of communicating with the past by tapping into undying information waves. She manages to reach the world of Ada Lovelace, founder of the idea of a computer language and proponent of the possibilities of the "difference engine." Ada's ideas were stifled and unfulfilled because of the reality of life as a woman in the nineteenth century. Emmy has a plan to defeat death and the past using her own DNA as a communicative agent to the past, bringing Ada to the present. But what are the possible ramifications?
In this video series an individual confronts fears and, through the process of confessing directly to the camera, transcends trauma. It is also about agin, longing, the delusions and misconceptions we are encumbered with as we mature towards self-awareness, and the masks we assume to deny or hide understanding. The tapes rupture, fracture, and use digital effects to mirror the psychological changes of the protagonist.
A woman's personal life unfolds over twelve years in a video diary that simultaneously parallels and reflects global history. Personal fears and obsession dissolve into a story of triumph and empowerment as the protagonist eventually finds her voice.
This docudrama presents the history of the telephone, updated and told from the point of view of a character who uses the screen as both a connection to intimacy and a condom for safe sex.
"A poetic allegory about technology's invasion of the body and the destruction of the immune system, witnessing the pollution of history that drowns us." - Video Data Bank
A love story for the 90s: Valery falls in love with an identical twin, a virtual reality scientist, and finds she can have a more intimate relationship with him through the computer screen than in person. Or is it really him?
Film becomes a metaphor for lost history and its “negative“ impact on successive generations who look for stability in an electronic world that lacks sufficient mediation. Video retrieves lost memories for the child who, through her camera, seeks to find her father.
Four "seduction ads" placed on cable TV stations invite unexpected responses. This short film is about fantasy and desire in a mediated world.
Binge turns on confession and self-image, using obesity as the main course. Losing her familiar shape to overeating, Lynn Hershman occupies electronic space to announce her despair and her subsequent—and partially successful—diet. It is a fitting medium for such a declaration, for not only is much of self-identity generated by television, but shape, volume, and appearance are rendered abstract by the video effects Hershman employs.—Steve Seid
In Lynn Hershman’s Confessions of a Chameleon the artist shares intimate but highly suspect stories about her past. To cover her tracks, Hershman unswervingly declares, “I always tell the truth.”
Shadow Stalker outlines the history of Predictive Policing, Digital Identity Theft and the dangers of Data Mining, that uses algorithms, performance and projections to make visible private Internet systems that are increasingly used by law enforcement and promote racial profiling. Drawing on a network of critical thinkers on surveillance and machine learning, Hershman Leeson abstracts the red square zone into a specter that haunts the work. Where one falls on the map in relation to this red square becomes a proxy for who one is-location, a proxy for identity.
