Movies: Cheryl Donegan

Henry Hills’s Emma’s Dilemma reinvents the portrait for the age of digital reproduction. In a set of tour-de-force probes into the images and essences of such downtown luminaries as Richard Foreman, Ken Jacobs, and Carolee Schneemann, Hills’s cinemat...

This film refracts Donegan's earlier performance work through the lens of a studio art practice. The artist subverts the tradition of studio painting by using a computer to make simple line drawings. Later, the computer is transformed into a canvas t...

The piece is a short lament and meditation on housework, heartbreak and posing, keeping up appearances and appearing to keep up....

A series of videos put together and updated regularly until Vine closed....

Scraps of color and pattern slide across the screen in a stop and start progression that frustrates all sense of spatiality and depth. David Schafer's delirious soundtrack adds to the disorientation....

In this documentation of a performance at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Donegan uses her body as an art-making tool, and toys with identity politics as well....

As the title suggests, a bodily metaphor, metabolism, is at play in the continuous cycle and recycle of images. As the models emerge and recede into darkness, images and patterns appear, degrade and reemerge to an uninterrupted beat. The cycle contin...

To the accompaniment of the only extant recording of James Joyce reading from his own work, Donegan uses a clear cellophane hood and a pane of glass to create another of her "face paintings." The performance is intercut with the artist painting over ...

Director Donegan recasts herself as Warhol superstar Viva from his 1967 film "Nude Restaurant"....

To a compilation soundtrack of studio out-takes, including excerpts from the Beach Boys recording sessions for Good Vibrations, we see Donegan work through series of painterly gestures. Her head is shaved; she then paints her head to simulate the los...

A recording of the Wilson Brothers trying to cut the single "Help Me Rhonda" under the overbearing scrutiny of father Murray, tells the story of the struggle to achieve the illusion of carefree, American fun....

Donegan calls into question the institutional armature that surrounds a work of art, and investigates boundaries between "high" and "low" culture....

Donegan sets up a series of charged relationships -- between artist and model, art object and artistic "gesture," performer and viewer. The "lieder" of the title (German for "songs") are the amplified squeaks of Donegan's swiveling metal stool as it ...

Life as seen through the lens of a plastic bottle....

Shot at the Flushing Mall in Queens, New York, "Flushing" is tour of a mall that doesn't live up to the glossy standards of typical American consumer palaces, but is thereby, perhaps a better place to understand the yearnings for fantasy via retailin...

Presenting "Cheryl" the home-shopping motivator as a surrogate and cheesy consumer goods as art objects, Cheryl the artist questions hype and material value in a personality-driven art market....

An obscure, appropriated Yoko Ono monologue is applied to a banal setting....

Refuses began as a visual extension of Carolyn Bergdahl's poem Fuses (after Carolee Schneemann). Just as Bergdhl's poem speaks to Schneemann's taboo-shattering 1964-66 film, Donegan's Refuses is a direct response to the poem. Using Bergdahl's poem as...

Writes Donegan: "... The video is the centerpiece of a large project comprised of paintings and video inspired by the Jean-Luc Godard film Le Mépris. This project does not seek to analyze or critique the Godard film, but to use it as a model, as an i...

Milk pours from a plastic container into a woman's mouth. The woman swallows it, dribbles it back at the container, and spits it out....