long time listener, first time caller
long time listener, first time caller
Video installation. long time listener, first time caller. 12 channel video. Megan Lennon. 2019.
Free viewing available upon request.
Artist Statement
My video performances feature glistening narrative vignettes of my idealized personas. Through these personas, I navigate my problematic habit of trying to please my loved ones [mostly the men] in my life by conforming to internalized ideas and external influences on how I should present myself and act as a cis woman. While I stress my growing frustrations and vulnerabilities through the subtle glitching of my characters, I acknowledge this groomed desire to fit within these hyper-feminine molds that have been crafted both by myself and by the figures around me.
Influenced by old Hollywood, my characters live in twinkling worlds that are made up of thrifted materials, elaborately coiffed wigs, and simple fabric backgrounds. In each of the 12-channels, I exist to make and break eye contact with the camera, to dance like I know what I am doing, and to own Hollywood tropes as if I invented them. These actions are influenced by my need to hyperbolize myself, and to give my negotiations with hyper femininity a private and absurd theater.
This 12-channel video is installed to create a set of personal theaters. Each theater is made up of a mid-century home movie screen, a projector that stands on a tripod, and a set of black rhinestoned headphones. Like a tin can telephone, the hand-bedazzled headphones function as an offering to the viewer who is invited to be voyeur in each of these worlds.
The video’s soundtracks are often omniscient, but occasionally interact directly with the scene. These altered songs are welded into jarring soundscapes and are coated in nostalgia. They serve as a manipulative tool to guide an overall feeling that the woman is trapped into acting out, on loop.
Alone, each persona offers a vulnerability through the means of a shanty personal theater; together, they stand as a field that wrestles the frustrations of becoming a chameleon to please others in an effort to love and be loved by them in return.