Artists Space

Leave: The Stumbling Woman

Screening
November 3, 2023, 7pm

Color image of a white, blonde woman laying face down on the floor. Empty bottles of alcohol and other drinks cover the floor, along with balloons, cardboard boxes and a wooden shelf.
Still from Leave, Cara Benedetto, 2023. [Color image of a white, blonde woman laying face down on the floor. Empty bottles of alcohol and other drinks cover the floor, along with balloons, cardboard boxes and a wooden shelf.]

Leave uses puppetry to explore representations of Caucasian women and drunkenness in film and television. The stumbling woman, made famous in films and TV shows such as Fatal Attraction, Fleabag, Killing Eve, and Single Drunk Female, is introduced face down on the carpet at the end of the night, surrounded by bottles and beer cans. She appears as a part-human-part-puppet character trying to piece together the night before. Combining a series of poetic and directorial voiceovers, subtitles, and text messages, Leave explores the erotics of the relationship between puppeteer and puppet, showing the way the puppeteer supports and manipulates the puppet to ask questions about agency and intoxication within the body horror genre.

Join creators Liang Luscombe, Cara Benedetto, and Coco Klockner after the screening to discuss their methodologies including the ‘exquisite corpse’ approach that gestures towards questions of power, the agency laden/relinquished body, the animated/deanimated body, its gendered and racial preconditions and assumed roles. White wine spritzers will be served.

Cara Benedetto is an artist and writer. She has presented solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and Chapter, NY, and has held performances at NAVEL, Los Angeles; the Cressman Center for the Visual Arts, Hite Art Institute, Louisville, KY; and the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Poland. Her work has been highlighted in exhibitions at MOCA, Cleveland; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; and Metro Pictures, NY, among others. Benedetto received her MFA at Columbia University, NY. She was a writer in residence at Callie’s Residency in 2023. She was a Rome Prize VCU Affiliate Fellow in 2021. She was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart and recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant in 2014. She is the author of four experimental novels, Mask of the Red Death at UDC (forthcoming), Origin of Love and Other Tales of Degradation (2021), Burning Blue (2016) and The Coming of Age (2015). She is the editor of Contemporary Print Handbook, published with Halmos (2015). She is currently an Associate Professor in Print Media at Virginia Commonwealth University.


Coco Klockner is an artist and writer in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of the novella K-Y (Genderfail, 2019) and her essays have been published in Texte Zur Kunst, Spike Art Magazine, Real Life Magazine, Liquid Architecture, and others. Recent exhibition venues include Silke Lindner (NY), White Columns (NY), Bad Water (Knoxville, TN), Skol Centre des Arts Actuels (MTL), Bass & Reiner (SF), Guadalajara90210 (CDMX), and LUBOV (NY).


Liang Luscombe’s practice encompasses puppetry and sculpture for video works that explore film and television histories. Luscombe received her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University, USA. She has been included in screenings at National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; Table, Chicago; The Front, New Orleans; The Sunview Luncheonette, NYC; ACMI, Melbourne; Composite, Melbourne; OpenTV, Chicago; Comfort Station, Chicago; and Vehicle, NYC. She has undertaken residencies at Adelaide Film Festival EXPAND Lab, 2023; Bemis Center of Contemporary Arts, 2022; Chicago Artist Coalition’s HATCH residency program, Chicago, 2019; SOMA Summer, Mexico City, 2018; Australia Council Studio, British School at Rome, Rome, 2013; and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art Studio Residency, Perth, 2011.

Artists Space Venue is generously supported by Lonti Ebers, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Allan Schwartzman, David Zwirner, and an anonymous contributor.