The Bunny Lake Series

(1999-2003)

The catalyst for Georgina Starr's 'The Bunny Lake Series' was her identification with two films from the 1960's: Bunny Lake is Missing (Otto Preminger, 1965) and Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1967). Bunny Lake is Missing is a movie about a girl who never comes home from her first day at school. It is a film about violent loss pressed into the cinematic codes of mystery and intrigue. At the heart of the film is a question : does the child really exist or is she is a figment of an hysterical 'mother's' imagination?

In Targets the young protagonist 'Bobby' fills up the boot of his open-top car with arsenal, goes home and kills his whole family in an unemotional display of domestic violence. He then goes on a killing spree ending up in a drive-in movie theatre where he shoots the movie viewers through a small hole in the cinema screen.

Like an architect with her blueprints, Starr first painted a watercolour to plan her route into the narrative. The painting, acting as a portal to a parallel universe, is set is the former 'Reseda Drive-In' in the San Fernando Valley, California (the original drive-in was used in Bogdanovich's film). The painting functions as a schematic for the entire Bunny Lake Series, which explodes out from its surface into an intricately constructed fictional world. There are hints and clues to all the subsequent works (The Bunny Lakes are Coming (2000), The Bunny Lake Collection (2001), Bunny Lake Drive-In (2002) and Inside Bunny Lake Garden (2003)) in this first illustration entitled 'The Bunny Lake Plan'.