self/cell, video installation, 2006
The self/cell series revels in the hidden philosophical, aesthetic, and emotional space concealed in what’s traditionally marginalized as “science”- exploring the language of the body and the imagination, beneath the glaring light of technology.
Box Boxing, video installation, 2005
A series of videos and photographs re-examining the inner life of boys, emphasizing their uniqueness and sensitivity in a culture that goes to great lengths to discourage it.
S’aline’s Solution
(9 minutes VHS on DVD), 1991
I made this video many years ago, when I was 40 years old, as a testament to the painful yet powerful right of women to choose. I wanted to find a voice for the pain, an acknowledgment of the courage involved in choosing to have an abortion- a voice I felt had been silenced in our culture.
The saline procedure is induced at the end of the first trimester with a local anesthesia of 200 milligrams of hypertonic saline solution. It is a fairly traumatic birthing process which includes dilation, contractions and a chemically induced early labor. It is an especially difficult procedure, an experience I understood first hand.
The video was greeted with much controversy. Many women felt I had played into the hands of the Right, appropriating “Back to Life” imagery and humanizing the embryo. I believe the piece stands up on its own as an emblematic statement about an issue that remains central and vital in these dangerous times: a woman’s right to choose. I became pregnant with my son two years later.
“A haunting personal statement that continues to grow in the mind long after the viewing”
Calvin Ahlgren, SF EXAMINER
Erotic Psyche Films
Out of a fierce time of exploration (approximately 1982-89), this collaboration emerged ~ at times tender, provocative, rapturous, subversive, and full of myth & mystery. In late 1982 began the Quest of the Erotic Psyche (Aline Mare and Bradley Eros), signaling ‘pleasure in resistance & resistance in pleasure’ through an investigation of desire and its discontents. This partnership thrived, seeking some kind of transmedia metamorphosis among the detritus of New York’s Lower East Side.
Erotic Psyche’s richly layered tapestries of hallucinatory images are riddled with provocative rituals, from sex to science to surgery, that are guaranteed to produce frissions of pleasure. –Ann-Sargent Wooster, VILLAGE VOICE
They fuse the dynamics of dream, blood, fire & flesh! –WANGLUNG, Berlin
Technologists of the flesh, they create hypnotic and voluptuous montages, reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s mystic incantations. –Manohla Dargis, VILLAGE VOICE
VENUS TO PENIS 1983, 14 min, video
Multi-Media Modern Myth. A transmission between Eros & Psyche: sexual politics, the juice and the friction, with lucid poetry rising to the surface. Interrogation, tenderness, rage, rapture, quest.
MUTABLE FIRE! 1984, 7.5 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm.
Totems of destruction & desire. An operation on the combustible urges in a junk black mass. A swiftly-sliced nightmare of history and erotic autobiography.
PYROTECHNICS 1985, 10.5 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm.
Telepathic music from the lab. The human tabula rasa and the pregnant androgyne in the ecstasy of transmissions. Science-friction myths of bio-electric energy.
CASSANDRA: SEETHING AT THE MOUTH 1985, 6 min, video
Revenge of the dirty words in a raging tongue.
HYSTÈRY 1985, 11 min, Super 8mm-to-video. Soundtrack: Einstürzende Neubauten & Psychic TV.
A transmutation of mystery/history/hysteria, where sex and sacrifice mix with death and voyeurism.
ELECTRAMORPHIC 1987, 14 min, Super 8mm-to-16mm.
Visions of creation & destruction: the birth of pyromania and explosive technology. Promethea’s homage to Reich & Tesla and the Orgone of Alternating Current.
Robert Frank’s “Keep Busy” (1975)
A spontaneous, improvised story about a group of people living on an island off Nova Scotia. Obsessed with daily aspects of their lives and the cycles of nature, the group is subjugated by a lighthouse keeper and his messenger, who have access to the only radio and therefore control the news.
I was living with Richard Serra in New York City and we went up to spend a summer in Nova Scotia where he had a second home. There were many visits to Robert Frank’s house in Mabou Mines, an isolated raw section of the island.Richard was close friends with Rudy Wurlitzer at the time, who had written a script for Robert: Keep Busy (1975). It was an improvisational script and we all went off to shoot the film on Margaree Island off the coast of Cape Breton over several Sunday afternoons.
The film had a lot of local New York artists in it including Joanne Akalitis, Joan Jonas, June Leaf (Robert’s wife at the time), Helene Tworkov, among others and of course- Richard Serra, who played the crazy Light Keeper. I had a small part, counting dead birds. It was a strangely moving experience and I felt honored to be connected to Robert who was constantly in a raw and internalized mood. His daughter Andrea had died in a freak accident the year before. The film was like a secret portal into Robert’s world, the call and answer to nothing- a kind of Becket -like dream state we all shared.
Beautiful Boys, video and photo-based images, 2006-2007
A series of large fragmented images of young boys on the cusp of manhood, inspired by the fleeting beauty of my own son and his circle of friends in their thirteenth year. They are shot as they float on a bed of water, their spontaneity and vulnerability exposed in a moment of unconscious beauty.
Basti Boy
Cyrus Boy
Gabe Boy
Josh Boy
Nichil Boy
Girls Seeing the Light, video and photo-based images, 2008-2009
Kaili Girl
Phoebe Girl
Sid Girl
Zoe Girl
In this series I am interacting with 10 year old Jewish girls, reminding them of the ancient ritual of lighting the Friday night candles while holding their hands over their eyes. Each girl is challenged to peek through their fingers to embrace the luminous reflections of light.
