How do you make music with plastic bottles, a toothbrush, a deck of cards and a kitchen scrub cloth? Or how do you make a photograph of your friends using a flashlight and a five-minute exposure time?
This is not a document about your average art program for kids. Rather, ART@NIGHT the documentary takes its name from one of America's most innovative contemporary art programs.
And using a combination of live-action footage and fun photo-animation techniques, what emerges is a high-energy, ground-level look at the experiences of elementary school kids in the process of exploring and discovering new ways to perceive and recreate their world.
This project borrows from the so-called secular world of urban graphic communication to project a message of beauty and universality. The video and lighting projections can be seen as creating a contingent order out of the density of images and messages that the dogmas of technology and marketing offer.
The projection of the ART@NIGHT logo and colored lighting on the facade of the church mixed graphic "branding" of the project and events with what is thought of as a marketing-free zone: sacred space.
The goals of the lighting of the church is twofold: to promote the live events happening inside and to create a public illumination of the church architecture for all to see outside.
Director & editor: John Scott. Animation & photography: Mary Kocol. Featured artist: Duane Slick. Music composer: Ken Ueno. Poet & writer: Diane Fraser. Executive producer: John Ruggieri. Quicktime video courtesy Peter Bullis, video editor, Brickyard VFX. Lighting equipment courtesy High Output.
The public art project ART@NIGHT, and accompanying documentary video, are supported by a $30,000 grant from the Fund for the Arts, a restricted fund of the New England Foundation for the Arts.
Abstraction Made Elementary (AME) was a dynamic and innovative nonprofit organization that linked young underserved children ages 7-12 with accomplished contemporary artists through public art and technology projects that build community and teach independent, creative, and critical thinking.
