Christine Negus is a queer, disabled, multidisciplinary artist, writer, educator, and cultural worker who received the National Film Board of Canada’s Best Emerging Canadian Video/Filmmaker award through Images Festival in 2008. Negus obtained her MFA from Northwestern University in Chicago (IL) and her BFA from Western University in London (ON). Some of her notable exhibitions and screenings include: Museum London, Ice Follies Festival, the8fest, CROSSROADS, Queer City Cinema, MIX NYC, Tangled Art Gallery, Artists’ Television Access, Dunlop Gallery, AKA artist-run, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, Swedish Film Institute, Art Gallery of York University, Montreal Underground Film Festival, and Kasseler Dokfest. She has had solo exhibitions at RPL Theatre, Forest City Gallery, Gallery TPW, gallerywest, Julius Caesar, The Pitch Project, and Modern Fuel. Negus has upcoming solo exhibitions at Land Line Chicago, Artcite Windsor, and YYZ. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications, including The Globe and Mail and Modern Painters, and an interview on Negus’ video practice appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of BlackFlash Magazine.
Christine Negus, My Better Years, Video Stills, 2016
Digital Video | Stereo Audio |1:51 min | 1920 x 1080
<https://vimeo.com/
With beginnings in a news story about a Florida woman living in a self-made house of horrors mixed with audio manipulated from a YouTube video of a doll, allegedly created by a serial killer, that sings “I Feel Fantastic” while zooming in on a supposed burial site of woman, My Better Years was born, somewhat like us all, out of trauma. As the narrator navigates her subject’s domestic space through a parade of blades, she ultimately pricks the subject of femme self-preservation and protection. Transubstantiating the woman’s body into that of a tiny, tender, green vegetable lovingly supported by layers of knives, the work provides an absurd misinterpretation and bastardization of the classic Princess and the Pea fable. This video culminates with the insightfully true utterance: “she would open her door and scream, ‘it’s a war out there’ before retreating back inside, …and she wasn’t wrong.” Overall, My Better Years twists the dualities inherent between comfort and danger, undercutting that a bed of knives isn’t the scariest thing out there and may make a better bedfellow than the alternative.
Pour citer cette page
Christine Negus, « My Better Years », MuseMedusa, no 8, 2020, <> (Page consultée le ).
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