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The Mom Tapes

Ilene Segalove

1974 00:26:52 United States English B&W and Color Mono 4:3 Video

Description

Segalove takes her mom as subject in these short pieces, recording her stories, her advice, and her daily routine. What results is a portrait of a contemporary mother-daughter relationship, touchingly devoid of drama and full of whimsical humor. For example, in one piece, Ilene’s mother laments over a pair of shoes her daughter has chosen to hang on the wall instead of wearing, saying,”With you, everything is art.” In another segment the camera focuses on a pair of unoccupied, overstuffed chairs. The voice of a teenage girl whines, “Mom, I’m bored—” then proceeds to reject each of her mother’s suggestions by throwing objects across the room: books, food, sports equipment, the telephone, and so forth.

An excerpt of this title (3:39) is also available on Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1.

About Ilene Segalove

Ilene Segalove was born in 1950 in Los Angeles. She studied communication arts at Loyola University and received a degree in fine arts from the University of California in Santa Barbara. Working in video since 1972, when she bought a Portapak from Nam June Paik's girlfriend, Ilene Segalove was initially, "offended by [video's] invasive quality and seduced by its power." A self-described "child of Beverly Hills," Segalove began pointing the camera at "familiar things," producing quasi-documentaries about her family (The Mom Tapes, 1973-75) and American TV culture (TV is OK, 1976).

Segalove was a member of the group Telethon, with Billy Adler, John Margolis, and Van Schley, which designed installations featuring  commercial TV collages, and guest edited an issue of Radical Software, "The TV Environment" (2:2, 1971).