Artists + Models

Cheryl Donegan

1998, 4:43 min, b&w, sound

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."

Head

Cheryl Donegan

1993, 2:54 min, color, sound

With Head, Donegan ushered in a new era of brash, low-tech performance video. Here she confronts sex, fantasy, and voyeurism in an autoerotic work-out performed to pop music. The tape records a direct performance action: Donegan unplugs the spout of a plastic container; a stream of milk spurts...

I Still Want to Drown

Cheryl Donegan

2010, 3:18 min, color, sound

Donegan writes, "The piece is a short lament and meditation on housework, heartbreak and posing...keeping up appearances and appearing to keep up...I thought about Douglas Sirk and decorating."

Practisse

Cheryl Donegan

1994, 6:40 min, color, sound

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,...

Rehearsal

Cheryl Donegan

1994, 14:25 min, color, sound

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...

The Janice Tapes

2000, 8:16 min, color, sound

The artist writes: "These works form a capstone to concerns that have been in my work since I began to make video — the artist's studio as theatre, the self-conscious/self-reflexive gesture that unites performance and painting, creation unraveled ... In this tautological space the performer, both object and subject, views herself from both sides of the mirror..."