CYNTHIA MAUGHAN: HOLIDAYS IN THE SUN
EAI Program @ Migrating Forms Festival
at Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Avenue
New York, NY 10003
EAI partnered with Migrating Forms to present the first New York screening devoted to the video work of Los Angeles-based artist Cynthia Maughan. Maughan produced nearly 300 direct-camera performances in a prolific period from 1973 through the 1980s. Absorbing Hollywood's beguiling superficiality, Maughan's performances treat the closed-circuit camera as a two-way mirror, in which and for which she prepares her public persona. Maughan's rarely-screened videos use and call attention to the tropes of television, horror films, B-movies, and lifestyle magazines, tackling issues of domesticity, hygiene, and gender roles with a dry wit and an iconoclastic sensibility. Cynthia Maughan: Holidays in the Sun featured works by Maughan alongside early videos by William Wegman and Paul McCarthy, as well as a reading from Trailer Life magazine, the basis for Maughan's series of the same title.
