Looks to 2010

Happy 2010 everyone!

As the holi-daze clears, Oliver, the LA-Artist crew, and myself have all been re-focusing our goals and ambitions for the new year.  As LA-Artist is a constantly evolving project, all of us who are actively involved are finding that new questions regarding our project are continually emerging.  Oliver and I, even when we aren’t working on a shoot, are usually dialoguing with friends, wives, and colleagues about the questions that drive our project and what it is our team aims to capture, to liberate, and to document.

Oliver and I have gotten some critical feedback recently from a fellow filmmaker/videographer who creates community based film projects.  My hometown newspaper penned a lovely article about our project and the ways that LA-Artist hopes to fuse the complicated landscape of Los Angeles by documenting the local lives of some of its community members.  Perhaps one of the most exciting developments for 2010 is our newly achieved fiscal sponsorship from the International Documentary Association (IDA)!  Without the business and marketing direction of the amazing Polly Baranco, LA-Artist would not have rang in the new year with such an exciting accomplishment!  Now that LA-Artist is officially sponsored by IDA, we can hope to take some huge strides into 2010.  John Armistead Wilson has come on board as a collaborating figure in the form of a grant writer (of which I hope to do as well).  Kristen Sheline, Oliver’s wife, is a continual part of our dialogues surrounding arts education and partnerships we have with youth education centers in Los Angeles.  Without Kristen, LA-Artist would have never come into being at all!  Kristen is an eighth grade math teacher for LAUSD who is writing her Master’s thesis on the linkages between mathematics and art.  She is investigating the ways that facilitating math through creative practices can catapult youth who feel insecure and uninterested in mathematics into a place of excitement, security, and possibility. Polly, John, and Kristen, LA-Artist thanks you ever so much for the ways you have been collaborating behind the scenes.

In other news, Oliver and I have been working to grow as interviewing practitioners.  Interviews are the backbone of our project.  Like many of you may know, an interview is an often complicated, difficult, and joyful conversation to have and conduct.  Oliver and I are learning a great deal about how to be patient yet incisive with the ways we go about having these interviewer/interviewee conversations.  This past weekend, the director and I had a fruitful practice session of interviewing one another.  We had the opportunity to experience the feeling of being the ’subject’ of the camera lens and the interviewee, all the discomfort that comes up, all the not knowing what to say, and the fear about presenting ourselves in honest, hopefully compelling, ways.  We then switched roles on each other, moving from the hot seat to the interviewer seat.  I think what I have come to understand is that there is no such thing as the perfect interview, or the perfect question, and that everything and anything that comes up is coming up for a reason, and a valid reason at that.  Soon, we will post these Crew Interviews to our website!  Stay tuned!

Finally, Oliver has Raphael Matias’ footage in the cutting room.  We hope to be releasing that in the next few weeks.  LA-Artist also looks forward to our shoot this week with the Los Angeles based artist, filmmaker, and writer Rika Ohara, the morning after we check out Nevermore: New Drawings, a new year exhibition by our friend and artist Phloe, at the Lot 44 Gallery in Downtown.