Nowadays the world of art is much more diverse, artists have moved far beyond the traditional art forms of painting, drawing and sculpting into a digital revolution of photography, video formatting and more. The artist we formed a documentary on was Arie Rain Glorie, and his main art medium was video works, installations and curating for other emerging artists. Conducting an interview requires a lot of work. We had to seek permission first by emailing him, and then arranging a suitable time for us to meet to film. Elle, Nicolette and I planned our interview questions before we arrived, researched his work through his website, and then we hired a Canon DSLR, tripods and the Media 1 video recorders to capture our project. Elle and I did the filming and we originally had issues with finding a location to shoot as the photography rooms were locked and classrooms were too noisy. Thus, we decide to film his natural working place, in his studio at RMIT. We set up two cameras, one up-close to represent personal thoughts and emotiveness and the second further away to establish the location and quirks of his personality, such as hand gestures, and the way he works.

Nicolette focused more on the editing, she cut down all the unwanted footage and in class we worked as a group to put all of it together, making decisions on how we wanted to portray Arie, and what we felt was important to present in the documentary. Utilising the program Premiere we put the footage together, and we decided that we would demonstrate his love for the art world, and his sense of “place” within it as a main focus for our film. We utilised his artworks to explain his artistic ability and the way in which he works as well as his time with testing grounds. We had a couple issues with filming, as the camera was on auto-focus and therefore, kept adjusting while filming which caused a lot of distractions. Another was that Arie said “um” quite frequently during the interview and didn’t answer in full sentences, which caused confusion and repetition. Nonetheless, we worked on minimising these issues to being displayed in the documentary with cutting of footage, and putting external photographs and footage over the top of his voice, creating a narrative throughout the documentary.

Arie Rain Glorie is an amazing, introverted artist with so many intricate and creative artworks, as he states he likes to make his work “kind of familiar but the audience wont be able to quite place where it’s come from”. Arie’s work relates to Gaston Bachelard (1969) as he states, “imagination argues the values of reality”. Arie describes art as his lifestyle, it his “constant thought” and he wishes to produce his diverse place of thought of life through his work, especially video works. He is dedicated to the art world, not just as an artist but as a curator as well. He curated a trilogy series entitled “Love/City” which was set up at Testing Grounds. Arie enjoys challenging the place of the traditional art viewing, he wishes to defer from museums and galleries and create a new sense of place for artworks to be displayed and this is why he chose Testing Grounds to view his curated project. This is also accentuated by his work itself, Arie loves working with videos as it allows him to manipulate time, place and space, in which one cannot do with live performance. This also coincides with Michael Jackson’s book, “At Home in the World”, as he expresses that “life cannot be pressed into the service of language”. There is never conversation or narration in his works, he rather communicate his thoughts through art and have the audience decipher their own meaning.

Project Brief 3 was the most challenging so far, I say this as working in group dynamic does allow a little difficulty when it comes to task allocations, finding similar availability to meet up, and you have more people to rely on than just yourself. I have had a lot of trouble with group assignments this year, not one assignment has run along smoothly, and therefore I favour working individually. However, Elle, Nicolette and I worked really well together, and although our timetables clashed we managed to work around it. We assigned tasks to be done by certain dates, and when things, out of our control, did not go according to plan, such as, response from Arie, and extra footage needed to complete the film, we worked cooperatively to solve the issues. Communication within our trio was excellent; we met up at every class, twice outside university, and had a constant group conversation on Facebook. Overall, I am happy with the final result of our assignment and how we reacted to the problems we faced, as we produced an documentary that represented Arie, his work, his creative ability, and his sense of place amongst the art world.

References:

Jackson, M 1995, At Home in the world, Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 1-8

Bachelard, G 1969, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston