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 cinematic inventions literally turn the screen upside down and inside out. In this epic journey into the picaresque, we follow Emma Bee Bernstein, our intrepid protagonist, from her pre-teen innocence to her late teen-attitude, as she learns about the downtown art scene firsthand. In the process, Hills reimagines the art of video in a style that achieves the density, complexity, and visual richness of his greatest films.

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 her own image as it appears on a video monitor, complicating the relation between her performance and the ways that technology both records and redefines the artist's work.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 retailing.

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 through the regressive act of directly marking the monitor. Painting is related to scatology as a correlation is made between art making and infantile fantasy.

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 lost hair. A model hand holding a paintbrush is made to trace randomly across a sheet of paper, producing a set of faux Abstract Expressionist marks. Naked beneath a clear plastic sheet, the artist paints portraits copied from a monitor. Dipping her head in paint, Donegan draws a line by pushing it across a canvas. Rehearsal explores the limitations of concepts of spontaneous creativity and expression.

Donegan eats her way layer by iconic layer through a white bread and KRAFT American Cheese sandwich — crafting hearts, stars, faces and bunnies as she goes. Through a strategic use of close-ups and an aggressive rock n'roll soundtrack, Donegan ironically probes the auto-eroticism inherent in the production and consumption of the "art object" in contemporary America.

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 inspiration, as a 'classical' language through which other stories can be told... I myself 'play' the roles of both Camille (B. Bardot) and Paul (M. Piccoli). In the Godard film, the characters meet over the recreation of Homer's Odyssey as a Hollywood-style film. In Line, my Homer, the representative of the noble, classical past or Father artist, is the American painter Barnett Newman. In the video, the characters struggle over how to recreate one of his classical 'zips.' This abstract expressionist gesture of presence, of affirmation is for them a mark of cancellation, of destruction. Are they wrong?"

In this black and white performance tape, Donegan continues her ironic exploration of the process of making art. Working within the format of a music video, Donegan plays with notions of artist and model, subject and object, and the "painterly gesture."

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 a template, Donegan creates a structured visual language that leans as much on formal rules as it does on content. In Donegan's silent collage of seemingly disparate images culled from Internet searches and home video footage, each new clip directly corresponds to a word in the original Bergdahl poem; the apparent stream of consciousness is governed by a rigorous set of rules.

Life as seen through the lens of a plastic bottle.

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 rotates.

Juxtaposing two restagings of a melodramatic scene from Tommy, The Who's rock opera, Channeling analyzes the ways in which media cannibalizes, revises, and resurrects itself. In Donegan's almost psychedelic renditions, a silver-garbed, red-wigged performer capers in a theatrical non-space of foil, plastic, police tape, and rescanned video images of Tommy star Ann-Margret. In Channeling in 4 Versions, actress Garland Hunter enacts the scene, and then, in a silent version (Channeling in 5 Versions), Donegan herself takes the role.

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

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.