INTERIORS:
WE ARE ALL PINK INSIDE
We Are All Pink Inside
Interiors: We Are All Pink Inside is a multi-part project that includes videos, photos and installations by Christen Clifford.
I was called “genitally motivated” by a professor once. I remember thinking, “Aren’t we all?“
Recently, somebody messaged me with a link to a vibrator that doubled as an internal camera. They thought it was a joke. I ordered one right away.
When AUNTS invited me to The Ace Hotel residency, I live-streamed from inside my vagina. All these people watching the stream messaged things like, “Show me your pussy!” I guess they didn’t understand that’s what they were seeing.
That night two other people used the camera with a condom—a man and woman who each wish to remain anonymous. The camera’s focus is actually about an inch from the end of the wand. Everything looks abstract.
We all look kinda pink on the inside.
Christen Clifford, 2015
INTERIORS: We Are All Pink Inside, 2018
Installation, video projection, plexiglass, fabric, wood
With INTERIORS, artist, writer, performer, and activist Christen Clifford creates an immersive, reflective environment with a pink, pixelated, moving landscape. Comprised of images of the vaginal and anal interiors of several artist participants (including Clifford herself) the elements of footage are virtually indistinguishable. For the artist, collecting images from participants across a spectrum of difference, “from female, male, trans, and non-binary bodies of many colors,” resulted in a what she called a “kindergarten revelation—that we are all pink inside.” Here, pink is imagined not only as a color (with its own set of gendered cultural and historical associations) but as a position: one of solidarity, affirmative sexuality, and healing. Conceived through an ongoing artistic process of moving toward healing from the artist’s earlier and recent traumas (an adolescent rape and and an adult experience of cancer) the installation offers a radically intimate space of repose within the exhibition.
-Stamatina Gregory
After that original AUNTSisDance at the ACE Hotel in 2015, the first project was The PussyBow : a Feminist Public Action disguised as a fashion accessory. The PussyBow was a named a 2015 “Most Feminist Fashion Moment” and written about in Refinery 29, Huffington Post and Nylon.
The Interiors were originally images from inside the artists' own vagina, and later evolved to include interior portraits of male, female, trans and non-binary bodies.
The photos are video stills taken with a Japanese sex toy camera. The camera focuses about an inch from the lens, and has an LED light. The different colors and shades of pink are from the amount of light captured. There is no digital manipulation of the photos or videos. There is no color manipulation.
As a 2018 feminist-in-residence at Project for Empty Space, Clifford showed large scale C prints and HD Metal prints and an installation with video.
In 2019, the installation was shown in Curriculum: spaces of learning and unlearning curated by Stamatina Gregory and Jeanne Vaccaro and was a Critic’s Pick in Artforum and an Editor’s Pick in artnet.
Christen Clifford is a feminist performance artist, mother, curator and writer whose work has been seen at The New Museum, Project for Empty Space, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, PS122/solonova, Eva Presenhuber, The Culture Project, AUNTSisDance, Postmasters Gallery, Panoply Performance Lab, Grace Exhibition Space, ArtShareLA, and Vox Populii. Grants and fellowships include Newark Creative Catalyst, NYFA, NYSCA, the Nonfiction Award at MFA Creative Writing program at The New School, Screen Forward Documentary Fellow at IFP, and a Fellow of the Production Assistance Program at Women Make Movies; residencies include The Museum of Motherhood, Some Serious Business, and the Ragdale Foundation. Clifford was a core member of No Wave Performance Task Force and was the lead artist on "We Wish Ana Mendieta Was Still Alive" outside of Dia: Chelsea and co-organzier of Crying; A Protest inside Dia:Beacon. Her work has been written about in New York Magazine, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, The Chicago Tribune, artnet, artnews, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, Refinery 29, Dazed, BOMB, and Slovenian Cosmo.Her own writing has appeared in The Guardian, Huffington Post, Got A Girl Crush, Broadly, Filmmaker Magazine and Hyperallergic. She co-chaired (with Jasmine Wahi) Rape, Representation and Radicality for The Feminist Art Project/ College Art Association in 2019, teaches at The New School and curates Experiments and Disorders at Dixon Place. She at work on her first film. Her limited edition risograph artbook launches in Spring 2021. Her studio is Project for Empty Space in Newark. She lives in Queens and online @cd_clifford
More at christenclifford.info
2015 AUNTSisDance ACEAIR residency at The Ace Hotel, NYC
2015 The PussyBow
2016 Interior, video, Femmes Video Art Festival at The Situation Room, Los Angeles
2016 Interior, video, Femmes Video Art Festival at LACE, Los Angeles
2017 Interior, video, FAIR Art Fair, Miami
2018 Interiors, performance with livestream, Art and Activism, ArtShare, Los Angeles
2018 Interiors: We Are All Pink Inside, installation, Project for Empty Space, Newark
2018 Interiors, performance with livestream, Project for Empty Space, Newark
2019 Interiors: We Are All Pink Inside, installation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts
2019 second ACEAIR residency at The Ace Hotel, NYC
2020 Interiors Chairs, 4 brass chairs with custom cotton velvet upholstery
2021 Interiors: Cervix NFT minted by Every Woman Biennial and Superchief Gallery NFT
from the review in Hyperallergic