A performance/video movie, 2016
28 minutes 50 seconds
Driven by the crises state of our biosphere and social unrest, a Playboy Bunny/animal of the same name traverses sweeping landscapes, layered with found footage of global events. With nature as her co-star, she points to our dystopian present. Using wry humor Bunny Girl ties environmental degradation to the suppression of the feminine, blossoming nonetheless in the face of attack.
“The strength of the piece is the character’s tender process of becoming animal— contrasted with her bare vulnerability and her inscribed sex-worker sexuality. This Playboy Bunny has gone feral from its social role, now potentially available to be with multitudes of other animals and plants. “Bunny Girl” is the product of a bio-politics in which power is not located in the gaze, as it has been for many feminist performance artists, but in the contingency of the body within an increasingly hostile ecology. The video work suggests a possibility of addressing environmental catastrophe and subjectivity from a non-human-centric starting place. Turning feminist performance in this direction borrows its defiant tone to rethink a fresh binary.
—Anne Leslie Selcer, Hyperallergic, June, 2017
BUNNY GIRL, full movie
BUNNY GIRL, Trailer
“There is something heroic about Bunny Girl [and] …something that reminds me of the lady in the radiator in David Lynch’s Eraserhead.”
—Jillian St. Jacque, Afterimage, The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Vol 44 #4, 2017
“A rock solid performative piece. Feminism and the Playboy Bunny grew up together… Monet Clark takes this investigation one high heel step further in Bunny Girl.”
—Dale Hoyt, Stretcher, visual culture in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, May 2016
“An experimental narrative… tying in the link between environmental degradation and the suppression of the feminine.”
–Jasmine Moorehead, Krowswork Gallery, April 2016
“…our hope for the future lies within the rising of the feminine.”
–Monet Clark, Artists and Climate Change, Performance, Video and Ritual in the Era of Climate Change, 2016
“…there is more to Bunny Girl’s story than a surreal character in an arbitrary landscape… [with] the flanking element of danger implicit in every frame…namely, her relationship to the dystopic events in the found footage… The more I look at Bunny Girl the more I am struck by the character’s resilience. She may look vulnerable…but I realize Bunny Girl is stronger than me…”
—Jillian St. Jacques, Afterimage, The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism,Vol 44 #4, 2017
BUNNY GIRL
A performance/video movie, 2016
28 minutes 50 seconds
written, directed & performed by Monet Clark
edited by Monet Clark
editing assistant Jared Johnson
visual effects editing Jared Johnson
director of photography Monet Clark
camera assistant Jared Johnson
original songs ‘Rainsong’ and ‘Snowmelt’ written & performed by Jared Johnson
sound Jared Johnson