Ilene Segalove

Ilene Segalove (born in Los Angeles, 1950) is a conceptual artist working with appropriated images, photography and video whose work can be understood as a precursor to The Pictures Generation.

Ilene Segalove was born and raised in Los Angeles. She came of age during the second-wave of feminism, a time when Betty Friedan’s book “The Feminine Mystique” became a bestseller and the media, television specifically, played an ever-present role in the lives of Americans. An avid consumer of television, Segalove received regular doses of popular culture via sitcoms and commercial breaks that repeatedly aired during television programming. She took this love of television and the notion that art can be made from the things of life when she embarked on her education in fine arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1968. While studying there she met Billy Adler and John Margolies, who were collaborators and professors of Ilene, and introduced her to the concept that one’s personal narrative could be strong material for art. She collaborated with them in a project called Telethon, a work in which they interviewed others about their personal experiences in relation to anthropological models, recorded it, and presented it in the University gallery as an installation made up of a living room with sofas, TV dinners and a television. But Segalove's first introduction to video was through her sculpture professor, Roland Brenner. Other early influences in using the medium of video included Wolfgang Stoerchle, then a graduate student at UCSB who later taught at CalArts, and the curator David Ross who had come from New York and was to launch the most comprehensive video exhibition in the coming years.

Upon completion of her bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972, she purchased a Sony PortaPak from Naim June Paik’s girlfriend, which she learned to use by continuously setting up scenarios and videotaping different aspects of her life. During this time she returned to Los Angeles and began taking classes with John Baldessari at CalArts. He encouraged Segalove to continue working with collage and found or appropriated photographs and reconstructing photographs from popular culture. While there she met David Salle, Robert Longo, and Wolfgang Stoerchle, with whom she shared ideas and entered into one another’s works in some form or another. During this time Segalove made Today’s Program: Jackson Pollack, “Lavendar Mist,” 1950, 1974, Gifts/I Love You/Bel Air Menthol, 1975, and If You Live Near Hollywood, You Can’t Help But Look Like Some 8x10 Glossy, 1976. Each one of these works entailed appropriating existing imagery and collaging it, using it as is, or restaging it in such a way that shows our internalization of the message that the media was selling us.

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