Sadie Benning
1973–
Sadie Benning has produced experimental videos since the late 1980s, beginning with those she shot in her childhood bedroom with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera (a gift from her father, the filmmaker James Benning) that illuminate her coming of age and coming out in the Midwest. Benning was still a teenager when her work was first exhibited, and in 1993 she became the youngest artist to be included in a Whitney Biennial. From 1998 to 2000 she was a member of the electronic music group Le Tigre, which projected her drawings as slides during their performances. Since 2006 her work has been focused primarily on painting.
Play Pause, a two-channel video that Benning produced in collaboration with Solveig Nelson, displays hundreds of the artist’s gouache drawings, scanned and sequenced, accompanied by electronic beats and ambient sound recordings she made in Chicago and Milwaukee. The title refers to Benning’s self-taught analogue method of sound editing using the “play” and “pause” functions of her cassette recorder— an anachronistic approach that engenders the sense of loss that permeates Play Pause. The drawings combine the aesthetics of the Pixelvision camera with Benning’s interest in the works of outsider artists like Henry Darger. Unlike most of her earlier videos, however, here there are no recurring characters and no directed storyline. Benning described the open-endedness of this approach as “a suspended narrative— an intensified narrative—a lack of narrative, to space out, to day dream, a musical feeling, ambience, an open room, jazz we like to listen to, a closed door, a revolving door, people looking, thinking about more than one thing at a time, being together, being alone.”
Introduction
Sadie T. Benning (born April 11, 1973) is an American artist, who has worked primarily in video, painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and sound. Benning creates experimental films and explores a variety of themes including surveillance, gender, ambiguity, transgression, play, intimacy, and identity. They became a known artist as a teenager, with their short films made with a PixelVision camera that have been described as "video diaries".
Benning was a co-founder and a former member of the American electronic rock band Le Tigre, from 1998 until 2001.
Wikidata identifier
Q448193
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed July 23, 2025.
Introduction
Video artist who explores the issues of self-definition and alienation, often in an autobiographical way. She was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, video artist
ULAN identifier
500114576
Names
Sadie Benning
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed July 23, 2025.
