Sadie Benning

The themes of sexual identity and the challenges of growing up are repeated throughout the body of Benning's work, who self-identified as a lesbian in 2014. Benning uses pop culture, such as music, television or newspapers, to amplify their message while simultaneously parodying the same pop culture. Benning also draws inspiration from images on television or in movies, observing: "They're totally fake and constructed to entertain and oppress at the same time – they're meaningless to women, and not just to gay women. I got started partly because I needed different images and I never wanted to wait for someone to do it for me". The use of a variety of media in her work gives insight to the viewer on how Benning has been mostly interacting with the world.

Benning's earlier videos – A New Year[1], Living Inside, Me and Rubyfruit, Jollies, and If Every Girl Had a Diary - used Benning's isolated surroundings and the effect this had on Benning as their main focus. In Benning's earliest work, A New Year, Benning shied away from being in front of the camera, instead focusing on their surroundings – primarily the confines of their room and bedroom window – to portray their feelings of angst, confusion and alienation. "I don't talk, I'm not physically in it, it's all handwritten text, music; I wanted to substitute objects, things that were around me, to illustrate the events. I used objects in the closest proximity – the television, toys, my dog, whatever."

In 2013, Benning was commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art for an installation of abstract paintings entitled Locating Center.

In 2006, in collaboration with SolFilm Forum, Los Angeles; Rotterdam Kunst Stichting, Netherlands; British Film Institute, London; Vera Vita Giola Gallery, Naples; National Film Theater, London; Galerie Crassi, Parisveig Nelson, Benning created Play Pause – a two-screen projected video installation. It was debuted at the Wexner in 2007 as part of the exhibition, "Sadie Benning: Suspended Animation." In September 2007, Play Pause was exhibited at the Dia Center in New York City. Concurrent with the Dia installation, the collaboratively run Orchard Gallery exhibited her abstract drawings, video installation, wall sculptures, and "play/pause" records in the solo show, "Form of...a waterfall." Two works from this exhibition were included in the 2007 White Columns Annual. Recent exhibitions include Play Pause, Power Plant Gallery (2008), 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008), and VHS the Exhibition, Franklin Street Works (2012).

Benning began creating visual works at age 15. Benning used a Fisher-Price PXL-2000 camera, also known as PixelVision, which was a Christmas gift from their father, the experimental filmmaker James Benning.

As their work has progressed, Benning has increasingly used images of their own body and voice. In works such as If Every Girl Had a Diary, Benning uses the limitations of the PixelVision to get extreme closeups of their own face, eyes, fingers, and other extremities so that the focus is on sections of their face as they narrate their life and thoughts. In 1998, the English Professor Mia Carter observed: "Benning's daring autoerotic and autobiographic videos, [their] ability to make the camera seem a part of [their] self, and extension of [their] body, invite the audience to know [them]."

In 1998, Benning co-founded Le Tigre, the feminist post-punk band whose members include ex-Bikini Kill singer/guitarist Kathleen Hanna and zinester Johanna Fateman. Benning left the band in 2001. JD Samson joined Le Tigre after Benning's departure.

1998 Up Close and Personal, Philadelphia Museum of Art

1996 Scream and Scream Again: Film in Art, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford

1994 In and Around the Body, Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania; Women's Self Portraits, University of California Santa Cruz, Berkeley, California; Queer Screen, Darlinghurst, Australia

The majority of Benning's shorts combined performance, experimental narrative, handwriting, and cut-up music to explore, among other subjects, gender and sexuality. Benning's work has been included in the Whitney Biennial on three occasions, and they were the youngest artist included in the museum's well-known and controversial 1993 Biennial.

1993 Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain; Film Forum, Los Angeles; Rotterdam Kunst Stichting, Netherlands; British Film Institute, London; Vera Vita Giola Gallery, Naples, Galerie Crassi, Paris

1992 911 Contemporary Arts Center, Seattle; Art and Kultureproject, Vienna, Videos on the Self, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki; Cinema in the 90s, Vassar College, New York

1991 Film in the Cities, St. Paul, Minnesota; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago

In 1991, the first article about Benning's work, written by Ellen Spiro, appeared in the national gay magazine The Advocate. In 2004, Bill Horrigan curated a retrospective of Benning's works on video. In 2009, Chloe Hope Johnson contributed a chapter in the book There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond (Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series) entitled Becoming-Grrrl The Voice and Videos of Sadie Benning.

1990 Artists' Television Access, San Francisco

Sadie Benning (born April 11, 1973) is an American visual artist, who works in video, painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and sound. Benning explores a variety of themes including surveillance, gender, ambiguity, transgression, play, intimacy, and identity.