2003

The New York Times

Laura Parnes
Participant
95 Rivington Street
Lower East Side
1/31/03
ART IN REVIEW

Laura Parnes' solo show has just one work, a film about 40 minutes long titled "Hollywood Inferno (Episode One)." But it's plenty, and it adds a welcome note of dissonance to a fluffy stretch in New York art.

As if in sly reference to the art world's infatuation with all things adolescent, Ms. Parnes has taken the teenage horror genre as her model. The screenplay revolves around two sisters who are students in a suburban parochial school. Sandy (played by Alissa Bennett) is streetwise and ambitious; Marie (Nina Marie Gardner) is naïve and spiritually inclined. Both work after-hours in a candy shop, which has the spick-and-span look of an art gallery.

Sandy has a thing for Kurt (Kel O'Neill), a bad-boy singer in a local garage band. But she attaches herself to a script writer named Virgil (Guy Richards Smit), who promises career contacts and gives her a picaresque tour through cultural hell. This includes a scene of Keystone Kop-style sex and a sadistically staged fashion shoot in front of a photo of the Columbine High School massacre. Sandy finally gets her big break by taking part in a snuff film in which a megalomaniacal director kills her sister.

The performances under Ms. Parnes' direction are funny, raunchy and skillfully maladroit. The dialogue, sleazy and fatuous, may even sound familiar: much of it is excerpted from "found" sources, including "A Clockwork Orange," a George Lucas interview and the writings of a crypto-conservative art critic. Ms. Parnes, who has a smart, notably unconservative critical eye, is now at work on her first feature film. I look forward to it.

HOLLAND COTTER