P. Staff

Hevn cuts together digital and analogue filmmaking techniques with poetry, hand painted animation and industrial sound. the work combines influence from Stephen Dwoskin's exploration of pleasure and pain in the sick or debilitated body with Staff's own video and poetry practice exploring the volatility of queer and trans bodies through dreaming, volatility, inebriation and exhaustion.

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Pure Means (2021) is a 4-minute, two-channel video work by artist P. Staff, commissioned by Frieze and Q/. Shot in the California desert, it explores themes of volatility, exhaustion, and queer intimacy through a disjunctive, red-and-blue 3D-style, featuring dancer Gregory Barnett. The film, which also appears in installations like the Julia Stoschek Collection, uses a frenzied, non-linear narrative to examine the viewer's position.

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The looped film is comprised of two parts: the first of scratched, warped and overlapping footage documenting the industrial farming of hormonal, reproductive and carnal animal commodities including urine, semen, meat, skins and fur. Rather than reducing the struggles of animals to a human-centric view, Staff questions the norms, subjectivity and standards by which all ‘others’ are read, measured and controlled and asks what lives are deemed visible in institutional spaces. The video’s second half comprises a poem describing life on Venus, an alternative state of non-life or near-death, a queer state of being that is volatile and in constant metamorphosis, infused with the violence of pressure and heat, destructive winds and the disorientating lapse of day into night.

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Through an unconventional narrative structure, Staff’s video cuts together a narration of Heinrich von Kleist’s play The Prince of Homburg with interviews, conversation, found footage, hand painted animation and song. In a series of fragmented ‘daytime’ sequences, a range of artists, writers and performers reflect on contemporary queer and trans identity and its proximity to desire and violence. Intercut with flashes of the sun and sky, city streets and text, subjects include Sarah Schulman, Che Gossett, Macy Rodman and Debra Soshoux. Each of these segments is punctuated by ‘night-time' diversions, narrated by writer Johanna Hedva in the dual role of both narrator and Prince.

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Patrick Staff’s film ‘Depollute‘ unflinchingly looks at the materialization of politics in violence done to one’s own body.

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Bathing explores themes of contamination, cleanliness, and debility through performance and dance. The work draws on Staff’s research into the classical figure of the bather, chemical effects, drunken revelry, and the spiritello figures that commonly adorn European fountains. The performer’s continuous actions and gestures eventually lead to overexertion of the body. A fluid cross-contamination between substance, performer, and image occurs, bringing to mind the ways in which bodies absorb and release chemicals, hormones, and other agents—a means of survival for some and potentially lethal for others.

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Patrick Staff’s newest work was inspired by artist-writer Catherine Lord’s memoir The Summer of Her Baldness (2004)—a moving and often irreverent account of the author’s experience of cancer. At the heart of Weed Killer is a monologue—adapted from Lord’s moving and often irreverent book—in which an actress reflects upon the chemically induced devastation of chemotherapy. This monologue is intertwined with comparatively otherworldly sequences, including choreographic gestures shot with high-definition thermal imaging. The film suggests a complex relationship to one’s own suffering and draws into focus the fine line between alternately poisonous and curative substances.

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Dear Hester (Reversed) explores queer intergenerational relationships negotiated through historical materials. The film uses a video document of British performance artist Hester Reeve reversed and re-edited to include a dialogue with the artist, through which Staff interjects a queer dialogue on care and performance, image and prosthesis.

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A portrait of a site and its multiple layers of existence, The Foundation takes place around Tom of Finland’s Foundation in Los Angeles, exploring the multiple layers, sub-communities, interpersonal relations, and erotic and artistic imaginaries that this site hosts, promotes, and projects.

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The film takes its title from the French term for the analog film technique of shooting by day, with a complex set of lenses and filters, to simulate a deep black-blue night. Though used frequently in early Hollywood films, the deception was often compromised, giving away the trick—the sun creeping into the frame, a reflection that wouldn’t occur in the moon’s soft light. Staff uses the technique, but does nothing to hide that it was filmed during the daytime: people play golf, birds sing, shoppers consume, and families gather under sun umbrellas at the beach.

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