Emily Wardill at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Emily Wardill: Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
September 9 – December 30, 2011
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is proud to present a solo exhibition of the work of British filmmaker Emily Wardill. The presentation will feature her 2007 film Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, in which props and costumed performers appear in theatrical situations that evoke the stained glass windows of Gothic cathedrals, yet possess a contradictorily contemporary sensibility in their actions and manner of speech. The title of the 12-minute film is a play on the popular phrase “Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll” and captures both the obsessive and unconventional qualities of the acting and mise-en-scene, as well as the allusion to stained glass windowsʼ original function of communicating moralistic religious tales to a largely illiterate public. The film suggests how allegory and metaphor were once used to condition and control human social behavior and how this condition is extended in contemporary political rhetoric.