Artworks

P.Staff’s video Weed Killer (2017), originally commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, features a trans-identified actress delivering a monologue adapted from Catherine Lord’s The Summer of Her Baldness: a Cancer Improvisation (2004), an irreverent and often darkly funny memoir about chemotherapy and its physical effects. The monologue is intercut with visually arresting shots rendered with thermal imaging, and a performance sequence that features a second actress (also transidentified) lip-synching to the 1997 garage house song ”To Be in Love” by Masters at Work to a distracted audience in a bar. In exploring trans and cancer experiences, Staff presents a profound meditation on biopolitics, disease, and the tensions (both social and physical) of what it means to inhabit a body.

P.Staff’s Weed Killer was presented in the Media Room during We Tell Ourselves Stories…In Order to Live (2018), a group exhibition, which featured work by Sophie Calle, Leonora Carrington, Lenka Clayton, Edgar Martins, Patrick Staff, Stephanie Syjuco, Katherine Vetne, and a special salon presentation of new paintings by Timothy Cummings titled Soft Targets.