About the Work
This film still from de Beer's 2006 video installation The Quickening features underground German music star Gina V. d'Orio as a sexually repressed member of New England's late-17th-century Puritans. The scarlet red of her frock and lipstick recall the transgressions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Hester Prynne. Drawing on the lore and imagery about Hawthorne's notorious hometown of Salem, MA, de Beer presents d'Orio as a heavily made-up, brazen coquette about to burst forth from the strictures placed on her by puritan mores. A mixture of history, fantasy, and feminist critique, this image proves de Beer is not only an artist but a cultural anthropologist.
About the Artist
Much in the way Jeffrey Eugenides did in his novel The Virgin Suicides, Sue de Beer’s films aim to explore the lives of "disaffected suburban American teenagers." Often blurring the lines between the real and the imagined in her films, de Beer inserts her subjects into highly stylized, theatrical scenarios that stand in stark contrast to the raw, complicated emotions that grip their psyches.
Splitting her time between Berlin and New York, de Beer has exhibited internationally at the New Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, the Brooklyn Museum, and Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
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