Sometimes the most beautiful thing is the thing standing right in front of you.
Project Statement
This project is a continuously unfolding exploration of the allure of the VHS tape in the digital era, and the people who love them. In particular, it’s an effort to understand the 2,000 tapes that have consumed my basement, which have been collected by my partner over the past 30 years. The collection includes mainstream films from the ‘80s and ‘90s acquired for cheap or free; TV programming recorded onto blank tapes by people we’ve never met; and educational content discarded by Portland Public Schools. The tapes are interesting, but the quantity is hard to rationalize, and they have acted as a wedge for nearly the entire duration of my partnership. This is a study of the physical and metaphorical baggage we bring into our homes and relationships.
The project began with an inexplicable desire to make archival boxes for these tapes as a gesture of acceptance and love for my partner, and I have since built a personal connection to each cassette I’ve boxed. In watching the tapes, I have found visually exciting, heartbreaking, and hilarious material that could fuel an art practice for decades. This has become a process of learning how to slow down, of learning how to be consistently and fully present with another person. It is a retraining of how to look and listen to my immediate environment. It’s also a lesson in the way things flourish with attention and care.
Artist Bio
Rebecca Burrell (she/they) is an emerging artist, designer, and writer working toward an MFA in Applied Craft & Design and an MA in Critical Studies at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is currently on hiatus from a nearly 20-year career in arts administration, in which she worked for the media arts center Open Signal, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, and many other organizations. Her artwork responds to the American education and social systems, and the workplaces that train us to value capitalist ideals: productive output over relationships, efficiency over slowness, rationality over emotion, and clarity over ambiguity. She investigates the ways that capitalism and digital culture disconnect us from our bodies and our inner worlds, as well as the people and physical spaces that surround us. She seeks alternative ways of being that are thoughtful, empathic, intuitive, and center the innermost human in us all.
