Third time is not the charm
We’d been working on videos with the cadence of one per week, where the brief would get incrementally harder each time. The third and final video was to be a one to three minute video relating to your art practice. Which is non-trivial, because, aren’t we in art school to figure out our art practice?
My idea for the third video came from a year ago - I had been meditating on how my life felt relatively small. It’s not a statement of self-loathing - just a statement that other people live their lives louder, and I live in comparison quietly, smally. I wanted to probe this state of feeling small with being small, visualized as views of the world from a small stature.
That was the inspiration anyway. And I really enjoyed my photos of plant life from the level of ground cover. However, the footage I was getting in the city somehow wasn’t working - taking a photo of pavement is less dramatic than seeing weeds up close. After a few attempts, I could either try going to the botanic garden in February, or try another tactic. Pick one, make it work.
I tried another tactic: I played with animation. I have no doubt I will want to explore this further, but what I made felt like just a test. It didn’t feel like something you want to show other people and get graded on.
But, with the short turn around time per video, the deadline to show the class what we’d made was upon me, and I just had test videos that weren’t really working. According to the course calendar, the final due date for this module was a week away, so thinking I had another week to try again, I cobbled my two test videos together.
Since I’m showing you this video, you have probably gathered I didn’t spend another week making another video. While I just threw stuff together to show, still, the tutor said he looked at the video as an art work. And my classmates, being the beautiful people they are, found something lovely to say to me.
Art school up until now has been a whirlwind tour with quick three-week pit stops for each medium. Three weeks doesn’t sound terribly short, but it’s just enough time to go deep just once. What if that excavation doesn’t lead to a happy discovery? On the road to becoming you-as-artist, even a negative discovery is useful, but in the confined view of art school and art school grades, it can be very unsatisfying.
Good news is, video is the last of the short pit stops of this year, and I’ve been told future coursework is designed to develop us and our practice.