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For the last several years I’ve been working on a “Thrift Store Tape” series. These videos are created from footage found on discarded home videotapes. On these tapes are fragments of the lives of people I’ve never met and most likely will never encounter. I’m fascinated by the fact that these memories have been lost or sold or traded, and the people that recorded these events have probably forgotten these tapes even exist. The attempt to understand or explain the people on these tapes is futile; they exist only as they filmed each other in a specific time and place. The weddings, graduations, birthdays, and everyday lives captured on these tapes have a fractured, dream-like logic. It is this meandering and seemingly aimless material that I begin with. My process for “finding” the structure of these Thrift Store Tapes is quite similar to my drawing process: I find a cast of characters, situations, and events, then arrange, distort, and attempt to distill the material down to its essence.
These found home video tapes are endlessly fascinating, subtle, confusing, tender, frightening… My intentions are not to exploit these tapes as a simple, voyeuristic curiosity. What I wish to share is my personal response to the quiet and complicated lives of "everyday" people.
| Director:
Brent Watanabe (their other films)
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| Producer: |
Genre: Experimental |
| Country: USA |
Copyright Year: 2001 |
| Original Format: Video |
Color Type: Color |
| Sound Type: Magnetic Stereo |
Length: 00:07:00 |
| Original Language: English |
Subtitle Language: |
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Label:
Aspect Magazine
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Other Info:
Audio commentary by Bill Arning:
Bill Arning is according to Boston Magazine's 2002 “Best of” issue, the best Curator in greater Boston! He is internationally known as a spirited curator, critic, essayist and educator in contemporary art and culture. Since joining the List Visual Arts Center in 2000 he has organized such critically acclaimed exhibitions as "Inside Space – Experiments in Redefining Rooms", February 2001, and "AA Bronson's Mirror Mirror", 2002, an artistic response to AIDS today, encompassing issues of post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor guilt. "Influence, Anxiety and Gratitude" opening in May, 2003 explores the concept and role of influence in the construction of art history and in the production of new culture. Arning was the chief curator at White Columns Alternative Arts Space, New York, from 1985-1996, where he organized the first New York exhibitions for many significant American and international artists of the period.
As a writer on art and culture, Arning's essays have been published in Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Art in America, World Art, Trans, Polliester, Bomb, and Honcho magazines and various catalogues for museums, alternative spaces and commercial galleries around the world. Recent essays include “Brief Encounter on the Piers” in Tony Feher, Bard College Museum and “The Sleazy Allure of Chris Burden” for Henrik Olesen – Sexuelle Zwischenstadien, Fabricious Projects, Copenhagen. His article Elaine Reichek's Rewoven Histories, was included in the Phaidon Book anthology Art and Feminism, in 2001. His essay “Everybody's Gay, (If Kurt Cobain said it, it must be true)” was published in Semiotexte anthology Imported: a Reading Seminar, ed. Rainer Gahnal. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts, N.Y.U. Graduate School of the Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design. Since arriving in Boston Arning is a frequent invited visitor to both The School of the Museum of fine Arts and The Massachusetts College of Art, as well as many other area schools.
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This film has never been screened
Microcinema Interview/Article:
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