Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #964 - Penny Slinger - Out of the Shadows

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #964 - Penny Slinger - Out of the Shadows

Hi Mom,

I wish I lived in London.

More screenings of this excellent documentary in the Spring of this year, 2018, after a premiere at London's Raindance film festival in September of 2017.

This film came to my attention because of the music and this image from Penny Slinger's art work "An Exorcism."

Her work is being re-discovered with current showings and this documentary.

Penny Slinger web site

This major artist deserves the renewed attention that she is receiving.





THE TRAILER FOR THE FILM

FOLLOWING TEXT FROM - https://www.pennyslingerfilm.com/


ABOUT THE FILM

“Penny Slinger – Out Of The Shadows” is the incredible, untold story of the British artist Penny Slinger and the traumatic events that led to the creation of her masterpiece, the 1977 photo-romance, ‘An Exorcism’.



Coming-of-age against a back drop of post-war austerity and the explosion of colour that characterized the 1960s counter-culture in London, Penny Slinger embraced her generation’s quest for personal freedom and sexual liberation and channeled these desires into her ground-breaking collages and sculptures. So powerful was her vision that 45 years later her work is still influencing contemporary artists.



“I wanted to create art that reflected a state of mind,” she explains. “To be my own muse.”  To achieve this Penny Slinger resuscitated Surrealism, instilling it with a radical, feminine perspective that led Rolling Stone to declare about her first book,  ‘50% The Visible Woman’ (1971) - “This is a major work – surely to become as ubiquitous as Sergeant Pepper in the culture.” As the respected curator and academic Anke Kempkes observes, "She could have become very, very famous."  History played out differently though and by the 1980s Penny Slinger had disappeared.



Richard Kovitch’s film documents Penny Slinger’s life during this intense period of creativity and considers the relevance of her work to the current generation. From her beginnings amidst the grey suburbs of Surrey, to her coming-of-age as part of the Kings Road art scene in the 'The Swinging 60s', all the way to the galleries of London, Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo decades later, this is a portrait of an artist across time that presents fresh experiences of the 1960s counter-culture, the role of women in post-war art and the personal risks an artist must take to emancipate their ideas.



We talk to Penny Slinger’s key collaborators from the period, including the radical filmmakers Peter Whitehead and Jack Bond, and consider her relationship with the acclaimed, feminist playwright Jane Arden, and the controversial film they worked on together, ‘The Other Side Of The Underneath’ (1972).  The respected critic Michael Bracewell and the Turner Prize Nominated artists Jane and Louise Wilson help us understand Penny’s relationship with Surrealism and her confidantes Max Ernst and Sir Roland Penrose. And we return to the mysterious, derelict mansion in Northamptonshire that proved such a fertile arena for Penny’s imagination and inspired her critically acclaimed ‘An Exorcism’ series. All this work broke new ground; in some instances it broke its creators. Not everyone made it out alive.



In the 21st century Penny Slinger’s art is being rediscovered via critically acclaimed shows at Broadway 1602, New York, The Riflemaker Gallery, London and most recently, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles. In 2017 she made the cover of the New York Times and was a major exhibitor at the Frieze Art Fair, London. The importance of her work and its continuing power to inspire has seen it embraced by a whole new generation of art lovers. Richard Kovitch’s film consolidates this renaissance, bringing Penny Slinger’s life and work ‘Out Of the Shadows’ and presents it anew for a contemporary audience.











SOUNDTRACK MUSIC





READ FULL REVIEW  AT 'LOOSE LIPS ' MAGAZINE HERE 

Penny Slinger: Out Of The Shadows
Directed by Richard Kovitch
Starring Penny Slinger, Peter Whitehead, Jack Bond, Michael Bracewell and Jane And Louise
Screening at Raindance September 21st, 25th, 2017

by Lewis Church

Penny Slinger’s visual art and performance grew out of the 1960s and 70s counterculture of Swinging London, and yet has remained largely overlooked in the historical documentation of the period. Richard Kovitch’s documentary Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadowsbegins to rectify this by enacting a deep and respectful survey of the startling, strange and alluring work Slinger produced across multiple art forms. With a fantastic soundtrack by Psychological Strategy Board, and editing that intriguingly echoes the collage aesthetic of Slinger’s visual artworks, the documentary feels both current and needed.

As contributor Maxa Zoller observes, the recentering and affirmation of work made by women during the time requires a denial of the ‘museumification of the sixties’ and a deep excavation and production of archival material. Out of the Shadows does this admirably, with comprehensive and important interviews with major participants, including Slinger herself and Peter Whitehead and Susanka Fraey, her partners and collaborators. Between them they suggest that Slinger’s bisexuality and challenge to an often-chauvinistic counterculture led, in part, to the oversight the film works to rectify. Slinger’s provocative staging of female desire is further referenced as both a successor to the Surrealists and a precursor to the YBAs, one that is only now coming to light.

The film concludes with an extended explanation and analysis of An Exorcism (1977), a piece seen as the synthesis of Slinger’s practice, and a concretisation of all her earlier potential. A collaged self-portrait and psychological journey, An Exorcism leaps from the screen as an under-documented masterpiece.

After this seminal work, Slinger largely retired from London art world, and the documentary too rather abruptly finishes, although not without offering a tantalising glimpse of her subsequent work with the Arawak peoples of the Caribbean. Whilst it would have been fantastic to see more of this, Out of the Shadows demonstrates the need for continual historical reappraisal and highlights the work of an artist who deserves to be better known.

Sex Work: a riot of body fluids, condom balloons and Day-Glo dick aliens - The Guardian

The anti-war phalluses and photorealist porn of feminist artists were shunned by collectors and banned from galleries. Can a bold new show at Frieze art fair change all that?

NY TIMES - On Frieze art show




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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = 966 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1802.24 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.