Girl Power
Sadie Benning
When she was 19, Sadie Benning made Girl Power with a PixelVision camera from Fisher-Price. She rebels loudly against school, parents and female stereotypes, and creates collages out of images and letters in a playful yet thoughtful way. Set to the soundtrack of Bikini Kill, the film is a defiant testimony to the 1990s in which Benning calls for sexual self-determination and radical independence.
Sadie Benning
Sadie Benning’s early works were made in the privacy of their childhood bedroom, using scrawled and handwritten text from diary entries that reveal the longings and complexities of a developing identity. Benning’s work emerges from a place half-innocent and half-adult—with all the honesty, humor, and desperation of a personality just coming into self-awareness, trapped and uneasy. Their more recent work moves into animation, film and installation.
Films by Sadie Benning (Selection)
Flat Is Beautiful 1998 | The Judy Spots 1995 | It Wasn’t Love 1992 | Jollies 1990 | Me and Ruby Fruit 1990 | Living Inside 1989
