Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes

2019

Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes is an experiential performance that explores screen space, maximalist femininity, and pop culture notions of transcendence. Using camp materiality and absurdist excess, Milton collides video projection, live performance, and hyperbolic visualizations into a series of meditations that draw from a history of feminist performance, drag cabaret, and psychoanalytic theory. 

In a fevered exaltation of the femme sublime, participants are guided through an immersive installation and into a chromophilic wonder of video noise, theatrical snow, and glitter while exploring the lines between the material and immaterial. Playing with the slippage between the camera, the mirror, and the screen, Guided Meditation with VHS Eyelashes embraces a sequin-laden absurdity in order to fracture and reflect the illusionistic magic of lens-based media and grieve the loss of analogue forms.

Live Performance with Three Channel Video
00:30:00

Performers
Elizabeth Milton
Tara Travis
Piotr Jaskiewicz

Performed
VIVO Media Arts Centre, Capture Photography Festival, Vancouver, BC, 2019
Dynasty Handbag’s Weirdo Night, Los Angeles, CA, 2018
Pink Waves, Deconstrukt Projects, Brooklyn, NY, 2018

Project Support
Sungpil Yoon
Alex Muir
Florence Tung
Richard Clark

Performance Documentation
Damaris Riedinger, Leigh Peterson

Talk
Capture Photography Festival:
Personality/Persona Identity Building In Photography

Artist Talk with Kali Spitzer, Carol Sawyer, Elizabeth Milton