Julie Orser

[1][7][6] In an Artforum review, Andrew Berardini wrote that Orser's work constructed "a female image that falls somewhere between icon and cliché … deftly re-creat[ing] the lurid dramas of cinematic pulp to study them as sites of fictional femininity.

[4][24][30] Orser magnifies and decontextualizes individual moments and filmic devices such as archetypal scenarios and props, genre music and Foley effects, or lighting tropes, while eschewing clear storylines.

[5][1] The videos of Occurrence at Lookout Rock (2005) were shot at Joshua Tree National Park and placed character archetypes—the Lady, Saloon Girl, Cowgirl and Outlaw—individually in an overlapping, four-channel panorama of rocky, Hollywood desert setting, free of narrative.

[4][1][31] Her 2007 multimedia installation, Anna Moore, mimicked the interior of a house, giving shape and context to a three-channel video of lush visuals portraying a scenario split between candy-colored suburbia and moody mystery centered on a classic 1950s Grace Kelly-style blonde.

[4][2][11] In oscillating scenes interspersed with dream-like close-ups of sexual caresses—and unified by character narration—the women appears as a primly dressed, perfect housewife and a wigged, black-suited femme fatale;[24][3][4] in a third scenario, in the guise of a distraught, highly made-up glamour queen, the heroine finds release from that seemingly suffocating double bind.

Juxtaposed were images of six different blonde women portraying the Madeleine character in flipbook-like, rotating head shots from front to back, which recalled the Pygmalion-like attempts of the film's male protagonist (and Hitchcock) to bring a certain vision of the female to life.

[22] In the collage-like work New Narrators ... (2018), Orser appropriated 1940s and 1950s print images of white men in suits and animated them being plucked out of frame by women's hands in a range of skin tones.