Day Magazine: Remembering Priscilla Prescott
$20.00
"Recreating the memory of a family that never existed, the Prescott’s stories are actually a fictionalized collage of real Hollywood stories that reveal the absurdities of the entertainment industry’s history, consider the ways viewers romanticize celebrity personas, and speak to the power of mediated images. Yet here, Day imagines a world where women have agency, fame, and a masterful ability to manipulate the media."
- Alicia Eler in Hyperallergic
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the death of illustrious film star and magnate Priscilla Prescott, Day Magazine reissued its special tell-all edition originally published April 10th, 1989. "Remembering Priscilla Prescott" traces the life and loves, tragedies and triumphs, and intrigues and escapades of that Hollywood dynasty that you love to hate. The Prescott women were pillars of the film world from their silent blockbusters to their straight-to-video flops of the late eighties.
Interdisciplinary and performance artist Lenae Day fleshes out her extensive hagiography of the fictional Prescott family. Day recasts, photographs, and films herself as all the Prescott women, their numerous husbands, and competitors and co-stars. Through the development of comprehensive visual, written, and performative personae and story lines, Day archives and inhabits the professional and personal sagas of the Prescotts. This faux archive - which takes form in Day’s elaborate multiplayer performances and photographic staging - is reminiscent of the conceptual dramaturgy structuring the work of Cindy Sherman and Eleanor Antin. The Prescott history is presented through the familiar, albeit peculiar, subjectivity of the film enthusiast. In the well-researched and reverent mode of the movie lover, Day crafts the Prescott Pictures annals to culminate in an immersive Hollywood rag magazine teeming with intricately crafted ephemera—such as headshots, candid shots, advertisements, movie posters, hand-sewn costumes, and props. Spanning the rise and fall of Classical Hollywood, Day’s "Remembering Priscilla Prescott" both reflects and intervenes in the manifold histories and myths related to studio and celebrity constructs.
8 x 11", full color and b/w images, 24 pages, 2014
Learn more at LenaeDay.com