Screen Tests
16 mm
2005-Present
(Video screening at ATA and on video loop at SOMArts)

Screen Tests  seeks to document queer people as moments of possibility. Beginning in New York City (2005) I have used 16mm film, Super 8, and security video to document queer artists, students, and workers. I simply ask subjects to stare into the camera so their eyes will tell our stories, so their eyes will show our existence as it unfolds in time. This work hopes to show how queer bodies transgress not only gender, but modernity and visibility. They are not so much test as historical document. 

Minimally inspired by Warhol's Screen Tests,  these images record identity, mark our visual history as well as our physical position outside the world of mass-mediated, commercial culture. The work contrasts the permanence, fragility, and distance of analog with the immediate and desultory character of digital media. I will be shooting in New Orleans, Austin TX, among other locations this year. For the upcoming program, Screen Tests can be displayed as a video loop, as a continuing work in progress.

--Bug Davidson