Kathy

Kathy is a looping single-channel video and poster for exhibition in museum, gallery and festival spaces.

The work depicts Kathy Bates’ performances sourced entirely from the actor’s film and television appearances. The interactions in the work draw attention to how Bates’ roles — which in film industry parlance were typically “secondary” — reinforced the legitimacy of those standards, precisely by virtue of that failure. In Bates’ combined subaltern roles, she is sexual, aggressive, abused, abusive, subservient, truth-telling, manipulative, non-woman and non-man.