For 5 months, Clarke held workshops with young women, ages 18-23 years old, who were incarcerated at the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility in Camarillo, California. As part of the weekly classes, the wards painted their faces and made digital self portraits. In the corner of the room was a video camera mounted on a tripod with a remote control. Each week the women sat alone in front of the camera and made a Diary tape. Inside Out includes several of the diaries.
Since 1972, independent video artist, Wendy Clarke (daughter of independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke) has conceived and produced numerous interactive installations and tapes that have been exhibited internationally on television, in museums, galleries and public places.
"Wendy Clarke’s work can be seen as an extension of her mother’s interests in cinema and video, but from a radically different perspective. While Shirley Clarke’s works are bold, in-your-face and directed from a definitive point of view, Wendy Clarke, more introspective in nature, allows the characters in front of the camera to tell their own stories. It is a cinema of listening, quiet beauty and devastating emotion."
— Eye on a Director: Shirley and Wendy Clarke, Museum of Arts and Design, 2016