The Power Plant

At age fifteen, Sadie Benning sparked international attention with videos that she had made with a Pixelvision toy camera. Shot in her bedroom, and featuring herself, these intimate, funny and revealing missives explored Benning’s emerging lesbian consciousness. Benning received a Rockefeller grant when she was nineteen and was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1993 at age twenty. In 2007 the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio, organized Sadie Benning: Suspended Animation, her first museum retrospective. This one-night screening guest-curated by Jon Davies includes highlights from Benning’s oeuvre, from such early autobiographical classics such as Jollies (1990) and A New Year (1989) to animated shorts which aired on MTV, The Judy Spots (1995), and her acclaimed featurette, Flat Is Beautiful (1998).