Bobby Abate Movies, TV Shows, and Filmography
Bobby Abate
Directing
Biography
BOBBY ABATE (Brooklyn, NY) is a Queer artist, filmmaker, and editor whose work has been showcased at the Museum of Modern Art’s MediaScope series, the New York Film Festival, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the San Francisco Cinematheque, and International Objects in NYC. Their Queer Objects series won third place at the 2024 Annual Works on Paper show, juried by Whitney Museum Chief Curator Kim Conaty, who praised the “playfulness in the selection of objects that were meaningful to the artist and in the way Abate captured their spirit.” Bobby’s residencies include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Art Space on Governors Island (2023), the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in Ithaca, NY (2024), and the VCCA in Amherst, VA (2024) and. They are the 2024 recipient of the Princess Grace Special Projects Grant, the Leighton International Artist Exchange Program grant for a residency at Zaratan Art Center in Lisbon (2025). Bobby holds an MFA from Bard College. As an editor, Bobby contributed to seasons 3 and 4 of the Queer docuseries We’re Here on HBO, which received Peabody and Television Academy awards. Additionally, they create animations for renowned drag performer Sasha Velour. In 2021, Bobby self-published The Outsider Tarot, featuring 80 original artworks that reimagine the traditional Tarot in a modern, Queer context. This deck, along with its 200-page guidebook, was presented at the Whitney Museum, Participant INC., and Miami MoCA. It was sold at Artbook at PS1 MoMA and is now part of the permanent collections at Harvard University’s Fine Arts Library and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. Bobby recently completed filming The Ghost at Skeleton Rock, a short film they wrote and directed, based on their coming-out story in 1992 during the height of the AIDS crisis.
Filmography Movies
Acting
A Few Extra Copies
An analog recreation and reclamation of the January 22, 1987 news conference in which Pennsylvania's State Treasurer Budd Dwyer grasped onto the pages of his final speech before shooting himself on live television.
Love Rose
A séance is performed by three cloned versions of the filmmaker in order to make a connection to another plane. The rules of the séance, written in 1920 by parapsychologist Hereward Carrington, are invoked on camera by novelist Lynne Tillman. According the text, roses which are seen as lights by spirits on the other plane, are placed on the séance table as a beacon. The spiritual dimension of the séance is captured with black and white video cameras dating back to the early 1970's that create visually stunning artifacts of light trails, black halos, and scan lines that swirl endlessly into the unknown.
Production
The Evil Eyes
A dysfunctional family deals with mortality, life and sexuality as they watch a soap opera.
Self-Portraits
In 1993-1994, when I was in art school, I felt like an outsider amongst outsiders. I was queer, but there were so few out queer people around me. I felt like I had no identity, so I started to obsessively do a numbered series of self portrait sketches in black pen to explore different personalities and aspects of myself. They range from fantastical to completely absurd. At some point, I started to dress up at these characters film myself using my family's old Sears VHS camera that I rescued from the garbage.
Kitty's Nite In
An analog video mix of Sylvester Stallone's first porno "A Party at Kitty and Stud's" and a sound piece from 1993 making Kitty's lonely dance in pink see-through nightie even more hypnotic.
Dirty Code
SECRETS AND LIES become an aggressive virus when injected into the binary code of several video clips -- degrading them into a visual corpse.
A Few Extra Copies
An analog recreation and reclamation of the January 22, 1987 news conference in which Pennsylvania's State Treasurer Budd Dwyer grasped onto the pages of his final speech before shooting himself on live television.
Yool Is Bloo
ONCE UPON A TIME, a jealous little elf named Yool felt neglected, lonely, and positively enraged. It was Christmas Eve and he knew Santa was away cavorting in other people's living rooms. The thought of Santa engorging himself on countless helpings of fatty milk and gooey cookies sent him into a rage, plus Yool knew all about Santa's secret kisses. Yool began smashing everything in sight, including his little elf friends with their upturned noses. A trusty hammer goes a long way on a lonely Christmas night.
A Party Record Packed with Sex and Sadness
A high & low fidelity record of obsessions past & present. A hooded man named Cobra Commander (drawn naked) and a boy with black glasses. A fanged woman and a girl in a rose colored wig. Heaven on Earth, Live to Tell, and headphones (worn naked). An airport terminal. An old Montgomery Ward catalog. That old orange bedspread, the red flowered couch.
Meet Me at the Pavilion
A series of vignettes, inspired by vintage 8mm home movies from the 1960's, that show a woman isolated and waiting inside of a nostalgic beachside landscape. The footage was shot on super-8 black and white reversal stock then optically printed to 16mm. This is the first of two films I made on location at Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts – a small run-down beach town frozen in the past.
Chisholm
Abate’s 16mm films The Tanti Man, The Zero Order and Chisholm invoke Kenneth Anger-esque horny montage fantasies of personal psychodrama and popular culture syncopated to nostalgic tunes.
Lucky
Crafted from softly pixilated QuickTime, NetMeeting sessions, emotive vintage pop, airplane disaster footage, online porn, streaming Hollywood trailers, and the curious hypnotic qualities of taping off computer monitors, Bobby Abate's internet-sex-n-death thrillogy explores new anxieties made possible by technology, and the profoundly intimate places that tiny images and lonely piano chords burrow deep within the soul.
Gallery
