Director: Sarah Lasley

Synopsis: Blending personal narrative with shared pop cultural experience, the artist manifests a long held childhood fantasy set within the love scene from “Dirty Dancing” (1987). “How I Choose to Spend the Remainder of my Birthing Years” juxtaposes pre-pubescent sexual desire with that of a woman descending her sexual peak. Fantasy is both a balm to religious piety and an act of resistance to the pressures put upon women approaching middle age. Here the digitally simulated image, in its wavering visual verisimilitude, exposes our willingness and desire to believe.

Bio: Sarah Lasley is a video artist from Louisville, Kentucky. Her no-budget films explore the mediated nature of gender and the subject/object relationship of the camera to a performer. She has taught video production and emerging media at Yale University, Pratt Institute, and Vassar College, and is currently an Assistant Professor of New Media at University of Texas, San Antonio. Her short films have screened internationally in film festivals and galleries, most recently at Lesley Heller Workspace in New York, NY, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA and Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT. She received her MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art in 2008 and her BFA in 2005 from the University of Louisville.

Program: Beauty, Sex & Shame – VAEFF 2021