Wendy Clark: The Prison Tapes (1979-2002) @ Cushion Works
Wendy Clarke (b. 1944) is a video pioneer whose practice spans more than five decades. She positions the camera—and just as importantly, the live monitor—as tools for intimacy, dialogue, and human connection across social and institutional boundaries. Working in direct collaboration with willing participants, her career attends to vulnerability and witness, giving voice to people and experiences that rarely surface in the public realm, let alone in art.
As the daughter of Shirley Clarke—a legend of American independent and experimental cinema whose features include Portrait of Jason (1967) and Ornette: Made in America (1985)—Wendy absorbed a heavy dose of avant-garde film culture. Taking a cue from her mother’s later process-driven work, she began to use the camera less as a means to an end than a way of being with people.
In the mid-1980s she left New York for Southern California, where she earned a PhD in psychology and worked as an artist in residence at the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility, the California Institution for Men (CIM) in Chino, and the CIM Del Norte facility, primarily with men in the HIV/AIDS unit. In dingy dayrooms and with minimal resources, she aimed to create the conditions for art, treating all those who wished to tell their stories as artists. Clarke engaged video as a tool for real-time reflection, presaging much of today’s content-based culture while remaining fundamentally distinct from it: human consciousness as an event rather than a brand, attention over circulation, and experimentation over exhibition.
The Prison Tapes gathers a remarkable selection of Clarke’s moving image work realized with incarcerated people across two decades. While discrete portions have been screened over the years, the work has never been collected or presented on this scale or in exhibition format. Diaristic, intentionally therapeutic, and emotionally moving, the tapes resist straightforward art historical or genre-based categorization. They ask what it means to be seen and heard, and how art and technology can create the critical distance that makes genuine closeness possible.
The exhibition includes Prison Love Tapes (1979), footage of men and women at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City speaking about love; Amen (1992), in which inmates from the HIV/AIDS unit at Del Norte recall memories from birth to the present; One on One, video pen pal exchanges between CIM inmates and collaborators on the outside; Videomasks, mask-based work with inmates at Del Norte; and Inside Out (2002), video diaries made by young women at Ventura Youth Correctional Facility.
Cushion Works will host a live event with Wendy Clarke during the run of the exhibition.
Special thanks to Janna Jones, Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, and Video Data Bank