| With a mixture of sarcasm and sincerity, my videos replay scenes from my own life through kitsch characters and cultural clichés, addressing wider issues of femininity, identity, and autobiography. In my earliest videos, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Tale of Narcissus (2003), I took the soundtracks from excerpts of the TV show, Sex and the City, and recreated the episodes playing all the parts myself and setting it in the 1970s. Lip-synching to lines from the show’s original dialogue, I integrated 70s feminist art practice into the contemporary representation of independent women in order to question both notions of femininity and how they impacted on me. | 
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Oriana Fox
Oriana Fox, Tale of Narcissus, 2003. Video duration: 4 min. 50 sec. Courtesy of the artist.
With a mixture of sarcasm and sincerity, my videos replay scenes from my own life through kitsch characters and cultural clichés, addressing wider issues of femininity, identity, and autobiography.
In my earliest videos, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and Tale of Narcissus (2003), I took the soundtracks from excerpts of the TV show, Sex and the City, and recreated the episodes playing all the parts myself and setting it in the 1970s. Lip-synching to lines from the show’s original dialogue, I integrated 70s feminist art practice into the contemporary representation of independent women in order to question both notions of femininity and how they impacted on me.
One of my more recent videos, All My Life (2007), is part coming-of-age story, part personal mythology. In it I recreate dance scenes from films such as Dirty Dancing, Grease, and Saturday Night Fever with myself as the heroine. A soundtrack based on a positive affirmation self-help tape and autobiographical anecdotes tells the story of the evolution of my choice of love objects. Through identification and embodiment I give depth to the most superficial of characters, and I become the star of my own Hollywood movie.
After that, I was ready to try to escape the shallow aspects of the movies and television, and what they have kept telling me about whom I was and what I wanted. Relinquishing appropriation almost altogether in favor of a more original form of expression, my film Excess Baggage (2007), embarks on a physical and emotional journey through the city of Marseille. Telling an allegory of a woman who can’t make even the most trivial of decisions, including which chocolate to eat, or what pair of underwear to put on, Excess Baggage attempts to bridge the gap between the banality of TV, the sentimentality of Hollywood love stories, and the earnestness of the early cinematic avant-garde. Beginning in the style of an American psycho-pharmaceutical advertisement, the visual and verbal language becomes increasingly genuine and personal.
