Part of Spring/Summer 1997, Winter 1997
From Brigitte Helm’s cyborg monster-body in Metropolis to slime goddess Alice Krieg in Star Trek: First Contact, female extra-terrestrials have cemented their territory in contemporary apocalyptic visual culture. An alien women…she’ll steal your soul, place it in her pod and clone it over and over again, she is the egg-women, she is the Walrus, koo koo ka choo. This program of recent works examines the female alien trope, not limited to death and the erotic, but also encompassing the emotional spaces of joy in insularity, terror in otherness and the complexity or impossibility of communion.
Mara Mattuschka in SOS Extraterrestria comes to earth looking for love but the only thing that will have sex with her is the Eiffel Tower. Incubated in the sewers of Chicago, Jennifer Reeder’s White Trash Girl avenges fuckheads through the ejection of her nasty lethal genital spray. In David Munroe’s exquisite First Love, Second Planet Crystal eludes intimacy with her lover by transporting their scenario to the planet Venus, where she sends an entire picnic up in smoke. Emily Breer’s animated Superhero flies through the sky, dukes it out with the likes of batman, and Al Razutis’ VR: A Movie is just plain terrifying.