Georgina Starr

We watched the film " Bunny Lake is Missing" during one of those babysitting nights. Both watching through the gaps in our fingers, we saw the mother search, in creepy black and white, for her missing daughter. I never saw the end. I could not handle it. My sister was never interested in finding her real mother." (Georgina Starr, The Bunny Lakes, 2002)

Annet Gelink Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo-show in the gallery of British artist Georgina Starr (Leeds, 1968). The exhibition consists of works that are all part of a series for which the film The Bunny Lake is Missing (1965) by Otto Preminger formed the starting point. Whether Starr's fascination with Preminger's film comes from an autobiographical experience, as the above-mentioned quote implies, remains the question. In her work Starr plays with the confusion between reality and fiction, between lived and dreamed worlds.

Otto Preminger's Bunny Lake is a little girl who's missing. Her mother is anxiously looking for her, but not everyone believes that the girl is really missing. Does Bunny Lake  exist or is she an imaginary person? It is not the answer but the question itself that matters to Starr. Her Bunny Lake-related works, varying from films, photographs and drawings to cars, t-shirts and haute couture, evoke this tension between reality and fiction. From the three videos, The Bunny Lakes are Coming (2000), The Bunny Lake Collection (2000) en Bunny Lake Drive-In (2001), and the 16 mm-film Bobby Bunny Buffer (2001) we learn that Starr's Bunny Lake is not a little girl, but takes on many forms.

For the duration of the show, the gallery front will become a garage forecourt, where the Thundesley Invacar is parked. This clumsy looking car, originally designed for disabled people, is the same model as the one Starr converted into the dreamy hot rod, The Bunny Lakemobile, that features in Bunny Lake Drive-In, a video partly influenced by the drive-in scene in Peter Bogdanovich's film Targets (1967).  The exhibition will show both versions: before and after the metamorphosis, and an up-dated poster from 1974 that advertises the Invacar. A trailer for the video The Bunny Lake Collection will be shown. The trailer focuses on the murderous children, The Bunny Lakes, who are out for revenge. The children form the protagonists in many of Starr's videos, including The Bunny Lake Getaway, a short video that Starr made especially for this exhibition. Another work on display is  Bobby Bunny Buffer, a homage to Kenneth Angers' film Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965),  where a man lovingly caresses his car.