The Miskatonic Institute is pleased to welcome filmmaker, collage artist, sculptor and performer Penny Slinger to our LA branch for an exclusive, in-depth conversation about her dark surrealist work in multiple mediums, moderated by filmmaker and Miskatonic NYC co-director Jacqueline Castel.
In 1969 Slinger created her student thesis on the collage art of Max Ernst, which was a combination of written text, film and original collage work. “Having discovered the magic of surrealism,” she later wrote, “I wanted to employ its tools and methods to create a language for the feminine psyche to express itself. The kind of language that dove into the subconscious for images and wantonly combined them into situations and relationships that were both confrontational and expressive.” It was the beginning of an artistic identity that, while always evolving, frequently addressed themes of interior space, body horror, female sexuality and psychosis.
Penny’s work – from with her early student short films and first book of collage art, 50% The Visible Woman to her collaborations with filmmakers Peter Whitehead (Lilford Hall, 1969) and Jane Arden’s Holocaust Theatre troupe (culminating in the feature film The Other Side of the Underneath, 1972), and her masterpiece of psychic trauma, the collage art book An Exorcism (1977) – was the spark for a new mode of surrealism focused on the female experience that would have ripples throughout the film and art worlds, though it would take many years for her pioneering influence to be acknowledged – something that has recently been rectified with Richard Kovitch’s illuminating documentary feature Penny Slinger: Out of the Shadows (2017).
Jacqueline Castel is a filmmaker, curator, archivist, and co-director of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. Her work as a writer and director has screened at Sundance, SXSW, Sitges, & Fantasia, and has featured collaborations with cult auteurs John Carpenter, David Lynch, and Jim Jarmusch. Castel’s archival work has extended to the estates of artists Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and H.R. Giger, and she has guest programmed for SXSW, the Alamo Drafthouse, New Beverly, Close-Up Film Centre, and Spectacle Theater.
She is currently in production on a documentary about international anticult Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth and in pre-production on an erotic thriller set in Tokyo co-written by herself and Sasha Grey.
