In The Box: Mix Tape (from Tape Number One)

In The Box this month, we present a selection of videos from San Francisco–based artist Tommy Becker’s ongoing Tape Number One project, which combines poetry and songwriting with performance, found footage, and handmade costumes and props. Part video poem and part music video, the short works included here set the artist’s sentimental yearnings against banal and often absurd imagery. Tape Number One: Side One is available for purchase in the Wexner Center Store. 

What follows are Tommy Becker’s descriptions of Tape Number One and the Mix Tape selections:

“My name is Tom and I like to do poems. My favroit [sic] is concrete poem because I like to draw. And I like to memorize poems because it is fun. When I grow up I might make my [sic] a book of poems. I like sad poems and happy poems but most of all I like silly poems.” 

I wrote that personal statement in second grade, pro-claiming my love of poems. Our class had completed a unit on poetry and a project that merged drawing and writing. My piece involved a large, green dragon sitting on its spiked back at a school dance. My teacher had opened the door for me, at this early age, to develop a love of combining text and image. 

I am drawn to the moving image’s ability to expand the poetic voice. The rigid song structure I’d previously been trapped in as a songwriter suddenly opened up as I beg-an collaging melodies and spoken poetry with filmed theatrics and computer-generated design. Eventually, 

I also gave away my suitcase of paintings and dedicated myself to developing a mode of storytelling through a video mix titled Tape Number One.

Catastrophe & Convenience

An out-of-breath man struggles to complete his week-end to-do list as Black Friday shoppers find themselves trapped in their frenzy. Weapons discharge in the solitude of nature as a boy’s daydream becomes an epiphany revealing the catastrophe of convenience. (2016, 7 mins.)

Prelude and Song for KOKO 

A life force is being held against its will or running wild through the streets. The moment the lion lunges at the tamer we understand his motives. We relate viscerally to its oppression as we connect to the soul of its being. (2015, 2:30 mins. and 4 mins.)

Song for the Lemons

The lemon, often utilized by famed still life painters, was rarely the focus of a composition. More typically, it was being abused for its compositional qualities. Its ovoid form of highly saturated yellow was used to balance the more dominant piling of apples, oranges, and pears. The lemon, I feel, never got its day in the sun. (2013, 5 mins.)

Tommy Becker received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and an MFA in film, video, and performance from California Coll-ege of the Arts in San Francisco in 2001. His single-channel work has been shown at galleries and festivals around the world including Bay Area Now 4 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Freewaves 10th Biennial Film, Video & New Media Art Festival, Los Angeles; White Columns, New York; Black Maria Film Festival, New York; FILE (Electronic Language International Festival) 2017, São Paulo; Ann Arbor Film Festival, Michigan; Currents New Media Film Festival, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Hawick, Scotland. Becker has been an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California and the Wexner Center’s Film/Video Studio. He currently lives in the Bay Area, where he works as an arts educator.