Suzie Silver

"A Spy: Hester Reeve Does the Doors" is a videotape by Suzie Silver, performance by Hester Reeve, music by The Doors. Based on a performance created and performed by Hester Reeve on March 8th & 9th, 1991 at Club Lower Links, Chicago, for the program, Bait and Switch (organized by Iris Moore and Suzie Silver.

Love is an obsession. Pop culture is filled with love songs. What can the musical expression of the word “love” mean? Here, one of the great vocalists of the twentieth century, Peggy Lee, sings us some clues.

Inspired, in part, by the cover of Megatron Man, Patrick Cowley’s archetypal Hi-NRG album, Robot Love is a celebration of the playful, synthetic, party-driven hedonistic culture of disco. A toy robot is seen dancing in ever-more elaborate and over-stimulating fantasy discos, and drifting and spinning in psychedelic wormholes. Essentially a music video for the Austrian band Ganymed’s absurd 1978 song, the video is playful and opulent, presenting a night at the disco as a mind-expanding trip to an alternate universe.

Suzie Silver directs and performs all the roles in this raucous and hilarious music video rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird, the infamous southern rock anthem for an entire generation of 1970s male youth. In this spoof of straight mass culture, Silver flips ironically between roles; from a lesbian proudly proclaiming her sexuality at the Academy Awards, to an in-concert Coors-drinking Ronnie Van Zant, and, finally, to a black-lace lesbian lounge swinger celebrating the wild, colorful world of “out” visibility. Silver draws upon an amazing array of found footage and special effects to bend genders and genres with spectacular visual delight.

A Victorian fairy tale told in the patois of an adventure video game, The Happiest Day is a journey back to a time that never was. Meandering through a cut-out computer-animated forest we come upon strangers enacting odd and playful rituals. These live-action sequences are loose reenactments of 1960’s and 1970’s performance artworks restaged in an Arcadian setting. The ecstatic jouissance of the original performances, with their primitivist nudity, shamanistic catharsis and pointed immediacy is re-located to a fabulous storybook world.

Peccatum Mutum explores the spirituality and personal relationships of cloistered Catholic nuns.

Based on a Swedish folk tale, The Sausage tells the humorous story of two sisters, three wishes, and a calamitous obsession with a sausage. The Sausage is the first completed episode of Fairy Fantastic! a fairy and folk tale series presenting gender fluid adaptations of classic tales.

Set in a campy western mining town, Stinkhorn tells the tale of a lady blacksmith named Dusty and her naughty trickster paramour, Blaze. At night Blaze turns Dusty's apprentices into horses and rides them all night long, Finally, Cassidy, the clever apprentice hatches a plan. A psychedelic trip wrapped in a queer western, Stinkhorn is a magical who-rides-who tale with a twist. Combining live action, drawings, miniatures and animation, Stinkhorn is the second story in, Fairy Fantastic!, a gender diverse folk and fairy tale series.