Shannon Plumb

Shannon Plumb produces super-8 short films ranging from 3 to 8 minutes, each starring herself dressed as several different characters. Described as witty self-portraits, Plumb's films remind us of Cindy Sherman's self-transformative powers, mixed with the expert pantomime of Charlie Chaplin. Plumb grew up watching the Hollywood classics: Groucho Marx, Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, Gene Kelly, and Shirley Temple, among others. Her influences stem from a number of cinema genres and periods, from Film Noir, the Western, and the Comedy, to the Peep Show, while reaching into her personal history.

The film Black and White revisits the eponymous format of film and creates a circular dialogue within the history of video art, incorporating and updating previous conventions. Inspired by artists that explore themes of gender and the notion of performance, Plumb integrates personal history into her films, using significant events as inspirations for new characters. She subtly captures a sense of nostalgia through the use of Super-8 film and its inherent scratches and blips. Unplanned events and ambient sounds "off screen" are welcome happenstance for Plumb, and are often incorporated into the scenes. Plumb subverts the medium by presenting a humorous combination of character and self at once. If a wig or moustache falls off in the filming, the viewer is included in the joke. Reality is made fantasy.

In An Elevator Ride, Plumb presents the viewer with a film that replicates security camera closed-circuit TV footage of elevator interiors. For this piece, Plumb plays close to 30 unique characters: a wildly eclectic range of passengers who enter and leave the elevators at differing times. The sense of simultaneous yet random action is reiterated as these images appear on all three monitors of the Video Wall. The public space becomes private; the rider stands alone, devoid of inhibitions, within the elevator. One empty elevator slowly reveals its identity as a set throughout the film, emphasizing Plumb's interest in the deconstruction of larger ideals.

Shannon Plumb has exhibited at Sara Meltzer Gallery, New York, and in such venues as the Lincoln Center Video Festival, the New Museum for Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn) and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London). Plumb has been included in the Lyons, Lake Placid, and Anchorage film festivals. She created a film with Fountainhead Films, Before Z, which was screened at Anthology Film Archives and is available in wide distribution.

Shannon Plumb
Behind the Curtain