Love Tapes by Wendy Clarke
Cafe at The Arts Center at Governors Island
On view through November 10, 2024
First exhibited as a part of LMCC’s World Views residency program in 1980 at the World Trade Center, Love Tapes by Wendy Clarke is one of the earliest and actively ongoing projects that LMCC has supported.
Love Tapes is a participatory video art project that has captured the ideas, beliefs and stories about love from everyday people. For almost five decades, Clarke has documented these intimate and vulnerable stories amassing a collection of over 2500 tapes. Each tape is a reminder of our shared humanity and that love unites us all.
For the 2024 exhibition season, LMCC will present digitized archival footage of Love Tapes on our social media platforms and on site at The Arts Center at Governors Island. We will also explore themes of love through a series of public workshops that focus on this deep emotion through our environment, music, and machines.
Artist Bio
Wendy Clarke (1944, Maryland) is an interactive video artist who is interested in using video as a self-reflective tool for understanding oneself and others. Given her first video equipment in 1972 by her mother; filmmaker and video artist Shirley Clarke, she recorded herself and made video diary entries which oftentimes centered on themes of love. Expanding her practice to others Clarke first asked members of her community and then public their feelings about love, and the video project Love Tapes was born.
Clarke has recorded Love Tapes from people from all over the world and has amassed a collection of 2,500 tapes which are in the archives at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.