Jennifer Goya
Fashion Plate, 2003
Single Channel Hi-8 Video
2 minutes, 52 seconds
Fashion Plate uses fashion styles from the early to mid-1900s as a historic link to the present. A dark historical narrative unfolds in this
The film playing in the upper left quadrant depicts a girl passing time by smoking a cigarette. She performs three tasks. The first task: she picks a pornographic-videotape growing out of a red flowerpot and destroys it with a golf club. The second task: she uses fertilizer to nourish the outside of an aged house as she walks towards a mannequin wearing a vintage Aloha blouse and a World War II gas mask. The third task: she opens an umbrella amongst a backdrop of melting snow and waits for something that’s never revealed to the viewer.
The lower quadrant film features a close-up view of a person sorting through picture slides of vintage clothing on a lighted table.
The upper right quadrants feature the same fashion slides being projected onto a screen outside amongst melting snow. The fashion slides were projected and filmed using Hi-8 videotape, then the footage was projected and filmed again multiple times. This structuralist act distorts the perfection of historical narratives. These three films inform one another creating an imaginary world, painting a visual poem about Hawaii’s own history embedded in colonialism, militarism, and tourism.
Exhibition
Hawaii International Film Festival
2003