Jenny Stark was born in Bellaire, Texas and lived in a haunted house until the age of eighteen. She would not have made it through high school if it had not been for Houston’s fertile goth culture. She received her BFA in Photography from the University of Houston and went on to receive an MFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts. She is an assistant professor of Digital Video and Multimedia at California State University at Sacramento. Her films and videos have shown at South by Southwest, The New York Underground Film Festival, The Viennale, Vienna, LA Film Forum, The Aurora Picture Show Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and upcoming at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City.

The earliest work in this series (Negative 10) was made while I was stuck alone in my apartment during a flood that devastated my hometown of Houston. I started to dig deep in my closet finding old VHS recordings from the late 80’s and the early nineties. Running through the tapes I found subtle parallels between this country’s recent history and pop culture elements. I also found creepy inconsistency in the US’s foreign policy. In these finished works I distill information from news updates, transform stories and alter music to create my own personal horror movies that are a reaction to distant wars and violent weather.

Christmas 1990 (2002) 4:10 Two memories—one pre Gulf War and one pre Reagan are overlapped using out-dated video technique. Hot off the press!