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The Love Tapes: World Trade Center

Wendy Clarke

2023 01:26:00 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:3Video
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Description

The Love Tapes: World Trade Center is a collection of videos from Wendy Clarke's Love Tapes project. The project began in 1977 and is ongoing. Love, as described throughout the tapes, is not defined by any one singular meaning, but is instead contextualized by the variety of personal perspectives and experiences within this collection. Videos in this selection were recorded at a station the artist set up in the World Trade Center in 1980, open over the course of three weeks. The project attracted visitors, people working at the World Trade Center, and interested individuals who learned about the project through TV and newspaper stories, as well as personal friends and patrons of the artist, to make the tapes. In total, 357 people made tapes. People were recorded for three minutes speaking about their thoughts on love and all its manifestations; each were invited to select their own background image and and music for each recording. The result is a collage of beautiful, often intimate, and sometimes poetic expressions and opinions of love.

About Wendy Clarke

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