Description

EAI partnered with Migrating Forms to present the first New York screening devoted to the video work of Los Angeles-based artist Cynthia Maughan. Maughan produced nearly 300 direct-camera performances in a prolific period from 1973 through the 1980s. Absorbing Hollywood's beguiling superficiality, Maughan's performances treat the closed-circuit camera as a two-way mirror, in which and for which she prepares her public persona. Maughan's rarely-screened videos use and call attention to the tropes of television, horror films, B-movies, and lifestyle magazines, tackling issues of domesticity, hygiene, and gender roles with a dry wit and an iconoclastic sensibility. Cynthia Maughan: Holidays in the Sun featured works by Maughan alongside early videos by William Wegman and Paul McCarthy, as well as a reading from Trailer Life magazine, the basis for Maughan's series of the same title.