Video, 7:43 min
Clothes Feelings uses comedic anecdotes and colorful illustrations to poke fun at my complex relationship to clothing. It is a self-deprecating and frank exploration of one non-binary person's failures to find a clear gender presentation that the general public will understand.
Video, 9 min
In April 2013, Justin Bieber went to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and wrote in the guestbook "hopefully, she would've been a Belieber." Poor Justin was only repeating the tour guide's suggestion of Anne's fandom; the ambitious writer Anne Frank had images of film stars on her walls, and at one point wanted to become one herself. In this historical mashup of 1943 and 2013, Anne and Justin meet over pizza to find out who would be a fan of whom. Religious Beliebs introduces a social media savvy Anne Frank back into the Anne Frank House. Anne and Justin go on an animated pizza date, with dialog created entirely out of their own quotations. An electro-pop dance video starring everyone's favorite Holocaust victim has us fallin' in love all over again.
Rebecca Friedman as the face of Anne Frank
Music by Lauren Klotzman
Collagraph prints, graphite drawings, voice acting, shooting, and editing by Buzz Slutzky
In May 2015, I created Justin Bieber's Anne Frank House, an installation within which to showcase my 3-part video Religious Beliebs. The installation consists of a wallpaper recreated from a Belgian one dating to the 1920s, "Anne Frank's Bed"-- a 20th century folding cot approximating the original, a Justin Bieber t-shirt with a 6-pointed gold "Jood" star, and drawings recreating the ones Anne Frank pasted onto her walls, with Justin Bieber added into the mix. JBAFH is a satire taking seriously Justin Bieber's statement that "Hopefully she [Anne Frank] would've been a Belieber."
Wallpaper collaborator: Avram Finklestein
Villanelle for Daters utilizes the traditional poetic form of the villanelle accompanied by illustrations on paper doilies. These traditional Western European forms are sarcastically used in contrast with crude content: internet dating sites, queer sex, and transgender embodiment.
Video, 6min 18sec
This series of sequences uses images and documentation of my experiences on Chatroulette, a website created to pair together random strangers for webcam-based conversation, that tends to be used for online sex. By keeping the video image within the frame of the chat screen, Chatroulette: Serial Terror explores the significance of the attempts by chatroulette users to find physical connection within online space, and the ways that this connection is interrupted by our sensory limits. By using drawings, screen shots, and digitally manipulated video footage, the digital space becomes wrought with tension between its own flatness and depth.
The OkCupid drawing series translates internet dating profiles into ink drawings and videos. I am concerned with the idea that internet users experience themselves through the construction of their profiles, being that the users select images and text that will advertize their social identity and relevance. In this way, my work becomes a playful interpretation of digital space uncomfortably IRL (in real life).
The notion of creating a hand-drawn copy of online information emphasizes the presence of a gaze and judgement of another internet user who might be evaluating people on the basis of their online construction. My inclusion of my own profile as subject to this judgmental gaze implicates myself in the inherent self-scrutinizing in the creation of a profile.
Video, 5min 34sec
When the fabric of space and time gets a little schmutz in its system during the spring of 1989, the future of the Slutzky family splits into two realities. In one fold, the Slutzkies stay in Overland Park, Kansas, and in the other, they relocate to Maplewood, NJ. In 2009, the two Buzz Slutzkies meet and sing songs related to their unique lives, on this edition of Hey Girl Hey, hosted by Zac Singer.
with Zac Singer
