Primetime(2023) Single channel high-definition video (color, sound), 15:15 minutes
"The modern trans woman is in some ways pure cinema. Our struggles to live a more properly signified body exemplify the anxiety of the moving image. Doubling, mistaken identity, and trickery are canonical cinematic themes — as every image in a video refers to or begs for another, constantly unsettling static identity. To take seriously the cinematic subject is to take seriously the split subject. Sexual difference inheres in images, as with any semiological system, and specifically in montages, where the de-essentialization and splitting represented by transness animates the moving image, which is why psychoanalysts from Freud to Lacan to today have been obsessed with Dreams and Films. Decades of film history have relied on transness, and particularly transfemininity, as a joke in of itself, the animating force or tension between body and image which makes cinema possible. Yet, any actual concretization, identification, or embodiment of this semiotic struggle must be met with violent, just retribution, as in 1994’s Ace Ventura Pet Detective, where someone passing as a woman is revealed to be lacking a vaginoplasty, solving a revenge kidnapping plot hinged on this disguise. Images, perhaps, are inherently viral - they beget transmission, exchange. Trans and queer people have always been associated with infection, and fears about contaminating the innocent, heteronormative subject has grounded anti-queer discourse for decades, from Matthew Shepard to recent Don’t Say Gay Laws… It’s clear that Fox, along with both conservative and liberal media, continues to identify transness as an attenuation or exemplar of queerness and its toxic appendages.”
kolya shields 