Paul Lamarre
Melissa P. Wolf

" the nea tapes "

the filmmakers

Paul Lamarre and Melissa P. Wolf are independent filmmakers and artists living in New York whose site-specific installations often include video. Their previous video projects include The Chelsea Tapes (1985) and The Starving Artists' Cookbook / Video (1991). They have been exhibited nationally and internationally and their work is in numerous collections. The Chelsea Tapes is a series of 26 video vignettes forming an autobiographical diary of Lamarre's extended stay at Manhattan's famous Chelsea Hotel. The Chelsea Tapes was awarded Best Non-Narrative Video at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1986, and can be found in the collections of the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in London, and the Staedlijk Museum in Amsterdam. The Chelsea Tapes was also awarded The Kitchen Media Bureau Grant, 1984 and 1985. Previous to this collaboration, Paul Lamarre received a 1982 CAPS Fellowship, in Multi-Media / Video / Performance for the video, Baking Bread and The Adult to the Child. A second documentary, The Starving Artists' Cookbook, a video series initiated in 1986, is a compendium video documentation of individual artists in the U.S., Europe and Russia. While expounding on the artists' relationship between art and life, The Starving Artists' Cookbook is also a portrait series on the artist in society; and a video enactment of the social / economic condition of an artists' international community. The Starving Artists' Cookbook (1991), was included in the Videonale, Bonner Kunstverein, Germany (1992); and also has received from Artists Space, an Individual Artists' Grant, 1989; from The Kitchen, a Media Bureau Grant, 1988; a CEC-ArtsLink Fellowship; and from New York Foundation for the Arts, a Video Fellowship, 1987.



Paul Lamarre

Melissa P. Wolf

Eidia House

The filmmakers, Paul Lamarre and Melissa P. Wolf are also co-executive directors of Eidia House, www.eidia.com a meeting place and forum for artists, scholars, poets, writers, architects and others interested in "idée force" - the arts as a instrument for positive social change . Eidia House is establishing an international Internet and news network system wherein artists and others can discuss a broad range of issues. The vehicles to accomplish this will include: eidia.com - an interactive streaming media archive; an "e" subscription newsletter and bulletin board. The archive will begin with the nea tapes documentary and its over 300 recorded video interviews, photographs, and written text on the subject of the controversy surrounding the National Endowment for the Arts and arts funding in America.

(In June 2003 while in Cincinnati Ohio presenting "the nea tapes" at Xavier University, Lamarre and Wolf met the artist Thomas Condon. Condon had been imprisoned for one year for his art. The filmmakers decided to begin a new documentary investigating why this artist was wrongly convicted.) Please visit: www.wideopenproductions.org for more details.


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"the nea tapes"
THE STARVING ARTISTS' COOKBOOK and VIDEO
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© 2007 Eidia House