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One on One: Ricky and Cecelia

Wendy Clarke

1992 00:29:00 United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:3Video

Description

Featuring Ricky and Cecelia from Wendy Clarke's One on One video series, this video exchange between the pair explores topics concerning sibling love, decaying family relationships, and a shared interest in professional football. Although brief compared to the other parts within the One on One series, there is a glimmer of genuine human connection in their words.

One on One is a series of video dialogues between the inmates at California Institution for Men in Chino, California, the members of the Church in Ocean Park in Santa Monica, California, and a group of Crenshaw residents in Los Angeles, California. One on One was produced while Wendy Clarke was the artist in residence at the California Institution for Men in Chino, California. The series uses the medium of video as a means to form relationships between people who would otherwise never get a chance to communicate with each other. 

Clarke held a video workshop where inmates from the prison made videotapes introducing themselves to strangers on the outside. The collaborators from Crenshaw and the Church in Ocean Park then created their own video responses. Throughout 1992, fifteen pairs of people communicated via this inside/outside process. The inmates and the outside contributors were to keep their dialogue only to video, never in person or through letters, in hopes of creating a pure video experience for the strangers to exchange.

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