Ellen Cantor

Through a multimedia art practice that encompassed drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, and film, as well as through her work as a curator and writer, Ellen Cantor (1961-2013) advanced bold new feminist representations of sexuality and female disempowerment and empowerment. Her work follows from a preceding generation of women who made challenging, often sexually explicit work, many of whom, such as Carolee Schneemann and Hannah Wilke, she included in the landmark 1993 exhibition she curated at David Zwirner Gallery in New York, Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women.

Of the exhibition, Cantor stated, "Sexual imagery created by and for women has a recent but powerful history. This exhibition intends to challenge the concepts of female sexual identity that have been constructed by our society, and to investigate how this identity might be formed anew." Cantor would continue to challenge conceptions of female sexuality and offer intimate, daring new models of sexual identity throughout her work, at times prompting controversy and censorship.

Cantor turned to video in the mid-1990s, as an extension of her drawing practice. As she came to recognize, her drawings often resembled storyboards, full of what she called "private" or "secret" "diary stories." Like these drawings, her videos also bring the "private" or "secret" into public spaces, such as that of the art gallery or cinema. In her very first video works, Cantor already displays the masterful facility in selecting and re-editing appropriated footage for which she would become known.

Cantor repurposes media images, from Disney and The Sound of Music to Antonioni and Cassavetes films, porn, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with wit and a critical eye, without ever mocking her source material or maintaining an ironic detachment from it. Cantor creates autobiography from these ingeniously edited mashups, which abound with startlingly intimate, diaristic scenes and stories, often through voiceover narration written and recorded by Cantor herself.

At other times, Cantor herself appears, in the form of direct address to the camera in a confessional video diary, or in a self-made sex tape. "Mine are 'true' love stories," Cantor once wrote. Through her self-conscious use of consumer video, in the form of VHS home video releases of major motion pictures or a sex tape or video diary shot on consumer-grade home movie technology such as Hi8 or MiniDV, Cantor both calls attention to the constructed fantasies on screen and heightens the illusion of reality.

Integrating Hollywood fairy tale castles, horror movie "final girls," homemade sex tapes, and video diaries into her own "'true' love stories," Cantor troubles boundaries between fiction and life, public and private.