birthday suit with scars and details

while I would love to save this to post on my own birthday, I do not have enough faith that I would actually remember,

so instead,

watch this video I love so much,

In honour of her birthday, Steele presents her naked body to the unblinking gaze of the camera. While the tape can be located within what Rosalind Krause has called 'the aesthetics of narcissism' that characterized the first decade of artist's video, it also provides an important counter-image to the emergent critique of the female body in narrative cinema. Catherine Russell

Lisa Steele, Birthday Suit with scars and defects, 1972

On the occasion of my 27th birthday I decided to do a tape that chronicled my passage through time. I have always been clumsy, tripping, dropping, falling with alarming regularity. This tape accepts the extent of the consequences. L.S.