Depicting subjects including pageants, fitness, stardom and Hollywood’s industrial underpinnings, the media artists in this program explore the pains and pleasures of performance, revealing how persona can discipline, liberate and occasionally brutalize the body. Featuring Morgan Fisher’s extraordinary and rarely seen 1968 film Documentary Footage, Mark Toscano’s award winning Releasing Human Energies (2013), Mariah Garnett’s Encounters I May or May Not Have Had With Peter Berlin (2012), Kelly Sears’ haunting collage The Body Besieged (2009), Lauren Kelley’s stop-motion animation Burlap Interior (2013) and Rita Gonzalez’s experimental video essay The Assumption of Lupe Velez (1998) this aesthetically diverse corpus of works explores posing figures as submissive and defiant, showing us how bodies work against and within media industries.More information at: https://cinema.usc.edu/events/event.cfm?id=15257