Laura Parnes

Real Life, Music, Television is a trilogy of music videos which examine the hyper-self-consciousness of adolescents. The images from "Performance" are derived from found footage of an 8th grade talent show and are combined with a list of gender-specific transformative sexual memories from the age of 4-18. "Ladies, There's a Space You Can't Go" is a deconstruction and a distortion of an episode of Sally Jesse Raphael titled "My Daughter Dresses Like A Hooker." "Talent Show" is derived from the same found footage as "Performance." The young boys lip-synch to a bubble gum rock song as they attempt to publicly assert their new-found sexual power.

Shown at The Spectacular Optical, Threadwaxing Space, New York City, Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami. No Is Yes examines the inevitable co-option of counter culture through two teenage girls that accidentally kill and mutilate their favorite rockstar. It is inspired by MTV' s habitual use of experimental film and video techniques to render elaborate ads for their specialized product—the pop star.

"Blood and Guts in High School" features actress Stephanie Vella in a series of video installations that re-imagine punk-feminist icon Kathy Acker’s book of the same title. The book received noteriety from 1978-1982 during the rise of Reagan republicanism and the emergence of punk rock. In Parnes’ interpretation, each video-chapter presents a typical scene in the life of Janie bracketed by US news events from the time period in which the book was written. These events saturate the character's daily experience, informing her adolescent, nihilistic worldview and her desire for rebellion. As the viewer looks back at pivotal historical events (Jonestown Massacre, Moral Majority, Three Mile Island etc.) connections are drawn in relation to our current political situation.

TOUR WITHOUT END (Twenty-One Portraits and a Protest) stars the legendary Wooster Group founder Kate Valk and Jim Fletcher (The NYC Players), and includes musicians Kathleen Hanna, Lizzie Bougatsos (Gang Gang Dance), Brontez Purnell (The Younger Lovers), and the poet Eileen Myles along with many other queer and feminist icons. Shot in real environments and situations, the core group of players improvise based on semi-scripted scenes. Because many of these performers are legendary in the downtown scene in NYC, they are archetypes playing archetypes. As the players move in and out of fictionalized characters and real life -- the film moves in and out of non-linear narrative and historical document.

Shown as an installation at Participant Inc, NYC. Screened at The Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid and at Pacific Film Archives at the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley. Like an update of George Romero's now classic 1978 barometer of cultural depression ("Dawn of the Dead"), "Hollywood Inferno" (two-channel video, 2001-02, 40:00), takes the viewer through the alienating world of a teenager named Sandy, a modern-day Dante, who descends into consumerist Hell on the escalator at the Mall.

Heidi 2, produced in collaboration with Sue de Beer, is a feminist revision of Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy's 1992 video, Heidi. This intentionally low-end production illustrates the way B-movie aesthetics can be employed ironically to comment on cultural depravity.

County Down is a web-based episodic digital film that explores an epidemic of psychosis among the adults in a gated community … which coincides with a teenage girl’s invention of a designer drug.