Elisabeth Subrin


Swallow


1995
video, 28:00

"Subrin's cross-texting Swallow portrays the artist as a young anorexic, bombarded by the contradictory messages of a malign culture. Personality disorders find their formal equivalents in a work that clouds the borders of the bio-pic, by shifting voices, legitimizing accounts, and skillful layerings of social history."
-Steve Seid, Curator, Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, CA

"For Subrin, as the visual metaphor of silence or speechlessness—evidenced primarily by the repeated use of white-out on the body, text and image—gains prominence in Swallow, it becomes clear that the fragility of female identity in post-feminist America appears, in part, as a failure of language itself."
-Tina Wasserman, New Art Examiner, Chicago

Selected Screenings:
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
The New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center, New York, NY
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
World Wide Video Festival, The Netherlands
European Media Art Festival, Osnabruck, Germany