Cellardoor

2000, 1:59 min, color, silent

In Cellardoor, Donegan makes a direct connection between her plastic bottle mask and a camera. She holds the bottle mask by its handle and pans the room as though she were operating a video camera. The perspective shifts between a static shot of the artist and the searching gaze from inside the plastic bottle.

The artist writes: "These works form a capstone to concerns that have been in my work since I began to make video -- the artist's studio as theatre, the self-conscious/self-reflexive gesture that unites performance and painting, creation unraveled. The space for painting/performance is very shallow - a makeshift set, the television screen, the frame of a painting. In this tautological space the performer, both object and subject, views herself from both sides of the mirror. The gestures performed are fleeting, interrupted, handicapped; the performer's back is against the wall. The imagery plays a game with elements that are part of the creative process - clean and dirty, sight and blindness, fullness and emptiness, chance and effort."

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2000, 8:16 min, color, sound