No More Sweets for You
Tuesday, April 15, 2025 at 7pm
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
German Song, Sadie Benning, 1995, digital projection, 6 mins
An Epic: Falling Between the Cracks, Nancy Andrews, 1995, digital projection, 6 mins
True Confessions of an Artist, Kirsten Stoltmann, 1994, digital projection, 5 mins
The Fight, Jeanine Oleson, 1995, digital projection, 3 mins
Sapphire and the Slave Girl, L. Franklin Gilliam, 1995, digital projection, 17 mins
I, Bear, Hendl Helen Mirra, 1995, digital projection, 6 mins
Dear Mom, Tammy Rae Carland, 1995, digital projection, 3 mins
aletheia, Tran T. Kim-Trang, 1992, digital projection, 16 mins
Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron), Cauleen Smith, 1992, 16mm, 6 mins
The Girl's Nervy, Jennifer Reeves, 1995, 16mm, 5 mins
My Failure to Assimilate, Cecilia Dougherty, 1995, digital projection, 20 mins
Presented with Video Data Bank
In 1995, after the rise of Third Wave feminism but before the social and political realignments of the internet, artist Elisabeth Subrin organized a screening of films and videos entitled No More Sweets For You. The program first showed at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago, then toured to Hallwalls in Buffalo and the MIX festival in New York City. Though each lineup differed, many of the core offerings were by American women who, like Subrin herself, were under 30. Seen today, it reveals a rich (and still, in many ways, underappreciated) vein of feminist experimental cinema at the end of the 20th century.
The works concern thwarted connections and, as Subrin put it at the time, “the fantasies, trauma and schizophrenia of solo-ness,” but the program also suggests an intensely collaborative milieu. Its artists were associated in numerous ways—as colleagues or lovers or friends—and traces of these relationships can be seen in the credits: Tammy Rae Carland appears as an interviewee in Cecilia Dougherty’s video, Subrin and Kirsten Stoltmann worked on Franklin Gilliam’s tape; and in turn Gilliam, Stoltmann, and Sadie Benning were involved with the production of Subrin’s own Swallow, completed that same year and featured in the original program.
Unlike boomer feminist celebrations of community and sisterhood, the screening is haunted by the specter of failure and figures of isolation. Consider the wandering latchkey kid of Benning’s German Song, the Nauman-eque artiste depicted in Kirsten Stoltmann’s Confessions, or the mop-haired child subject of Hendl Helen Mirra’s I, Bear. Nowhere are film or video employed as simple tools of communication; both celluloid and electronic images are likewise approached as malleable, tactile forms, made visually complex through multiple layers of remediation: documents collaged and animated, videos re-taped off monitors, images scratched, frozen, and painted-over. The viewer can sense lone psyches wrestling with the crises of their day, in the cellular isolation of a late-night editing suite. Identities are metabolized by, and drift between, a range of audiovisual formats and processes, including Super-8, manually-edited 16mm, analog video, Pixelvision, and digital effects.
With a typically Gen-X dialectical ambivalence, these artists collectively argue that isolation can simultaneously foster both mental destabilization and social resistance. “In an era of corporate grunge, queer commodification, empowerment politics and right-wing cyborgs,” Subrin asks in her original program notes, “how do the unassimilated survive without being smashed, named or forced to participate?” The answer provided by No More Sweets for You: it’s personal, it’s deep, and it’s complicated.
Followed by a conversation with several of the artists.
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.