IOW: Go BTS in local ART series
Confidential practitioners! This week is a very good week for us to let our newest “Image of the Week” do the talking on behalf of our film and video brethren. (Don’t worry, your humble editor will throw down pontifications aplenty beginning next week in regards to C-U Confdential #8 and #9, the New Art Film Festival, and other choice topics.) WILL-TV at the University of Illinois has just released a new artist profile series called ART: BEHIND THE SCENES, produced by Tim Meyers with photography and editing assistance from Issac Musgrave, which is now available on YouTube and set to appear on the PBS affiliate. Running approximately three minutes each, the slickly-produced vignettes introduce viewers to individuals who create significant work as Champaign County residents. Three of these first eight are devoted to very familiar faces: Nina Paley, the alternative cartoonist and SITA SINGS THE BLUES filmmaker, Thomas Nicol, the stop-motion animator and Champaign Movie Makers director, and Deke Weaver, a UIUC associate professor in the School of Art and Design and the performance artist behind the “Unreliable Bestiary” multimedia experiences.
Season One of ART/BTS, also including musicians Ryan Groff and T.R.U.T.H., fiber artist Ann Coddington Rast, painter Langston Allston, and tattoo artist Ainslie Heilich, was produced by WILL/Illinois Public Media in partnership with 40 North 88 West and is partially supported by an Illinois Arts Council grant. This project seems to be a successor to the “Artists at Work Video Series” made last year by 40 North’s programs and events coordinator, Amanda Baker.
~ Jason Pankoke