The Foundation

Patrick Staff’s newest work was inspired by artist-writer Catherine Lord’s memoir The Summer of Her Baldness (2004)—a moving and often irreverent account of the author’s experience of cancer. At the heart of Weed Killer is a monologue—adapted from Lord’s moving and often irreverent book—in which an actress reflects upon the chemically induced devastation of chemotherapy. This monologue is intertwined with comparatively otherworldly sequences, including choreographic gestures shot with high-definition thermal imaging. The film suggests a complex relationship to one’s own suffering and draws into focus the fine line between alternately poisonous and curative substances.

Patrick Staff’s film ‘Depollute‘ unflinchingly looks at the materialization of politics in violence done to one’s own body.

The looped film is comprised of two parts: the first of scratched, warped and overlapping footage documenting the industrial farming of hormonal, reproductive and carnal animal commodities including urine, semen, meat, skins and fur. Rather than reducing the struggles of animals to a human-centric view, Staff questions the norms, subjectivity and standards by which all ‘others’ are read, measured and controlled and asks what lives are deemed visible in institutional spaces. The video’s second half comprises a poem describing life on Venus, an alternative state of non-life or near-death, a queer state of being that is volatile and in constant metamorphosis, infused with the violence of pressure and heat, destructive winds and the disorientating lapse of day into night.

Hevn cuts together digital and analogue filmmaking techniques with poetry, hand painted animation and industrial sound. the work combines influence from Stephen Dwoskin's exploration of pleasure and pain in the sick or debilitated body with Staff's own video and poetry practice exploring the volatility of queer and trans bodies through dreaming, volatility, inebriation and exhaustion.

Pure Means (2021) is a 4-minute, two-channel video work by artist P. Staff, commissioned by Frieze and Q/. Shot in the California desert, it explores themes of volatility, exhaustion, and queer intimacy through a disjunctive, red-and-blue 3D-style, featuring dancer Gregory Barnett. The film, which also appears in installations like the Julia Stoschek Collection, uses a frenzied, non-linear narrative to examine the viewer's position.

Through an unconventional narrative structure, Staff’s video cuts together a narration of Heinrich von Kleist’s play The Prince of Homburg with interviews, conversation, found footage, hand painted animation and song. In a series of fragmented ‘daytime’ sequences, a range of artists, writers and performers reflect on contemporary queer and trans identity and its proximity to desire and violence. Intercut with flashes of the sun and sky, city streets and text, subjects include Sarah Schulman, Che Gossett, Macy Rodman and Debra Soshoux. Each of these segments is punctuated by ‘night-time' diversions, narrated by writer Johanna Hedva in the dual role of both narrator and Prince.