New York, NY March 8, 2022 - Fresh off the laurels of voted "Best Gallery in New York City", Brooklyn based underground art collective The Locker Room launched into their second annual residency program capped by a month-long pop up show in Little Italy. This year, they celebrate "New York Women", featuring 10 artists across different mediums.

Amongst the paintings, sound installation, light sculptures and photography is filmmaker Winnie Cheung's docu-horror video installation projected across six television sets and a projector screen. Each channel displays sexy and bloody images of women painting, sculpting, feeding each other, taking naked selfies and mutilating themselves.

As part of The Locker Room's residency program, the New York native conjured up the premise to shoot a genre bending docu-horror feature while building a video installation in just 28 days. Winnie's vision was one of the many wildly ambitious projects incubated at The Locker Room and it was that energy that fueled the plot to her film.  While documenting each artist at the height of their creative process, Winnie often found her film blurring the lines between life and fiction.

“Rather than representing women as sexualized victims through the traditional lens of male fantasies, I wanted to explore the real horror behind the anxiety of being a female artist, which is often mixed in with pleasure, joy and delirium”. - Winnie Cheung

Winnie's no stranger to embracing the magic behind the limitations of indie filmmaking. In 2019, her gruesomely mesmerizing animated short "Albatross Soup" enjoyed an international screening tour and won Vimeo Staff Pick's "Animation of the Year". During the height of the pandemic, she co-produced, edited and sound designed Kier-La Janisse's epic folk horror documentary which won SXSW Midnighters Audience Award last year. Both films were produced on a shoestring budget.




For her feature film debut, Winnie was prepared to approach it in the same spirit. Ahead of the shoot, The Locker Room and Winnie watched low budget, supernatural and experimental films, pulling inspiration from Jason Banker’s indie horror thriller “Toad Road”, Jim Weber’s no-budget blockbuster “Deadbeat at Dawn” and the seminal Japanese experimental horror comedy “Hausu”. Additionally, Winnie studied a slate of debut features directed by master directors.

"One thing that I realized from watching so many first time features was that none of them were perfect - far from it, but what was so palpable was the raw energy of the moment and the sheer joy of trying to complete that first feature". - Winnie Cheung

So The Locker Room Gallery became the movie set. The artists starred as the actors portraying themselves and all the imperfections of shooting a no budget feature added to the charm and tone of the film. Winnie’s project currently lives as a video installation which can be seen from March 8th-29th from 11am-7pm daily at 138 Mulberry St. She will be giving an artist talk on March 22 at 7pm. "Residency" is slated for a festival exhibition in Spring 2023

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