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Learn more- In the two-channel digital video installation 'Happy Christmas Mom and Dad' (2006), Quilla Constance (aka Jennifer Allen) offers her parents (played expertly by Jennifer Allen's own parents) an exotic dance to the tune of a popular Christmas song. Predictably, this Freudian nightmare of a Christmas present provokes her parents' mortification: (for dad) repressed anger with a hint of incestuous desire, and (for mum) devastation and worry over the father's reaction. Quilla Constance aka Jennifer Allen has remarked how no other work of hers, including some of the more intense performances, has generated as strong an emotional reaction as this video. 'How could you do this to your parents?' some have reportedly asked her in disbelief, while others walked away in disgust. To an attentive viewer, it is easy to see that the dance and the reactions were filmed separately and subsequently synced together to create the illusion of Quilla Constance aka Jennifer Allen stripping in front of her parents. The use of North American spelling for 'mom' suggests the context for this devastating undoing of the family romance: this isn't just any Christmas but a schmaltzy, over-produced and televisually mediated Christmas, an ideological instrument for hypernormative social reproduction and seasonal consumerism in one sanitized package. Revisiting the incest taboo in a later song video, 'Snow Daddy' (2010), Quilla Constance restages her family-busting striptease in the large living room of an opulent country house, this time with professional actors. 'Snow Daddy', Quilla Constance (2017) has noted, 'operates as a semblance of pop [...] the video occupies a liminal space through its refusal to fully commit and conform to the requirements of pop'. Snow Daddy, in other words, ups the ante not only in terms of production values but as full-blown 'genre-f**k', a term obviously modelled on 'genderf**k', which not only blurs the boundaries between established genres but also questions the separation between fiction and experience, reading and living. (Dr Alexandra Kokoli, 2016, Van Abbemuseum, BAM Conference: Conceptualism - Intersectional Readings, International Framings, Black Artists and Modernism)
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