Sometimes you have to try different things to find your passion. This week, Leslie Foster shares his journey into experimental filmmaking. They talk about going to grad school, paying the bills, and the difference between the film and art world.
Listen to Leslie share how he found his passion with experimental filmmaking.
Key Points:
1:37 – How Leslie got started
4:38 – First film job
5:34 – First art installation
5:24 – Qualifications to join the union
11:51 – Goal after grad school
15:00 – Leslie inspired Tanya to get into film
17:37 – Paying the bills
28:53 – What do you look for when curating art
33:32 – Where to find a community when getting started
35:49- Reliable old piece of gear
37:43 – New Gadget that revolutionizes work
45:03 – Shifting from film to art
47:04 – Future projects
50:50 – Experimental film definition
Links:
Leslie Foster Patreon
Leslie Instagram
Fusion 360
Evernote
Website
Full Transcript:
Leslie: I’d say a new thing would be Fusion 360, which is a 3D design software that is designed specifically for being able to mill and 3D print. So you’re kind of building to exact specifications and it’s built with those tools in mind. So if I want to build something on a CNC mill, I can design it that way so that the mill is speaking the same language as the program. Same thing with 3D printing. And that’s been a really good way to create objects for my installations, one but two.
It’s also a good way to just lay out my installation, because I can do it with exact measurements and I can set up kind of a rough gallery set up and I can set up where my projectors are, the throws and everything. And that’s a really great preproduction visualization tool. So both of creating objects, but also for previs. Yeah, it’s very similar to CAD.
Tanya: Welcome to the Practical Filmmaker, an educational podcast brought to you by the Filmmaker Institute and Sunscreen Film Festival, where industry professionals talk nuts and bolts and the steps they took to find their success today.
On today’s show, Leslie Foster introduces us to experimental film within the art world, how it works and how his design media art studies at UCLA helps them get closer to his goal of creating art with film as a medium.
Find the full transcripts and more at thepracticalfilmmaker.com. I’m your host, Tanya Musgrave. And today we have Leslie Foster, experimental filmmaker, director of art residency at Level Ground, which is an arts nonprofit based in L.A. And he is now deep in the throes of the design media arts MFA program at UCLA.
Welcome to the show.
Leslie: It’s good to be here, Tanya.
Tanya: OK, so we’ve known each other going on about like, what, 15, 16 years now.
Leslie:Yeah.
Tanya: So we got to set the stage for the rest of the folks. How did you get to where you are right now?
Leslie: I spent a lot of time in undergrad, kind of wandering around different things. I studied biology for three years. I was studying German in Austria and Germany and just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And I thought I had a plan, it fell apart while I was in Austria, in Germany.
And I realized I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And after six months of kind of stressing about this, my roommate, Chris Walters, who was a student at Southern Adventist University, said, “Well, what do you love?” And so I started listing things I loved, like literature or fashion, science, and I just kept going.
And he kind of just stops me he’s like, “Oh. That’s film.” And I had this massive light bulb moment like that that shifted the course of my entire life at that point. Maybe the only light bulb moment like that I will ever get, I don’t think I will have another.
I kind of went back to Thailand after that year in Austria and Germany, stewed on that, looked at a bunch of different film schools. And Chris had said, you’re going to look at a lot of places, but you’re probably going to end up going to Southern because of the practical education there.
And at that point and things have changed now there’s a few schools that do really good, practical undergrads in film. But Southern was one of the few places that did like a very hands on program right from jump.
I talked to students from USC and UCLA now, and the access to gear and equipment is still hard for them. Whereas at Southern, we had access to gear and equipment pretty quickly and got to play. And I thought that was amazing.
So I ended up going there. I have to, you know, acknowledge that I’m kind of putting words on what my experience was then, because I didn’t have the words there. But I think what I was doing was I was looking for a medium.
I wasn’t so much looking to be in the film industry. I was an artist looking for a medium, and film was that medium. But it took me a while to actually discover that about myself. Because I knew that I wanted to do kind of weirder films, like my first films were like super poetic.
Tanya: No, Leslie films?
Leslie: See? Exactly right. So there’s already a reputation. Yeah. So I mean, again, a word that I would apply to that is poetic cinema, something that I use a lot of my writing now, but it’s not a word I had then.
So I was just kind of creating poetry. And I realized that film and visual language was the language I’d been looking for all my life in my writing and my poetry. Maya Deren, who’s considered one of the founders the mother of experimental film, says that she was a mediocre poet in written language, and then she discovered film and that’s where she could really create poetry. And I found the same thing. I’m not a great poet in written language, like I have a few things that I’m happy about. So it was great to like find a language that worked for me.
And so at Southern, I just you know, I don’t think I even specifically was like, I’m going to make weird art film. I was just creating this stuff that was bubbling up for me. Yeah. You know, I adored the folks there, but they didn’t necessarily know what to do with me.
I am grateful that they gave me space. You know, instead of shutting me down, they at least gave me the space to work on that. So after that, I ended up getting a job in London for a year where I worked for a production company that was associated with the Adventist Church called TED Media.
And we created music videos, short films. And one of the reasons I was attracted to it is that it seemed like there is space for me to kind of like hone the more experimental feeling I was having, like I was getting I was starting to get that vocabulary that, oh, I’m doing stuff more in experimental space.
But at that point, my headspace was still like the film industry. That’s the place to do this. I just have to create my own pocket. And if you fast forward over the next few years, I end up in L.A. and starting my own nonprofit that ultimately falls apart three years in.
But I learned a lot of really beautiful things from that and tried to create experimental work in that way. And again, it was like, I have to create my own bubble in the film world. And somewhere in that process, I started meeting people who are doing video art within the fine art space and hearing about that.
I was like, oh, wait, wait, wait. Maybe that’s actually where I want to be creating this. And in 2013, as the nonprofit was sort of having its kind of heartbreaking, faltering, you know, end, I was invited by a curator, Sara Konno, who’d seen some of my student work.
And it was like, I want you to create new work for a show that I’m putting on in downtown L.A.. And I said no to her.
Tanya: What?
Leslie: And I kept saying no, because I was like, I’m busy. I’m trying to get this feature documentary finished and is.
And I spent like we’d kind of put all the nonprofit’s resources in doing this documentary about violent homophobia in Jamaica. I’d spent five weeks undercover in Jamaica with cinematographer Tim Banks. It was something that was really dear to my heart, and we were not able to get the funding for Post.
And so that’s kind of my life was consumed with that. So the last thing I wanted to hear was like, do this thing, do this other thing, create a whole other film. And she kept bugging me. She actually started sending me Nike swooshes on my phone. “Just do it. Just do it.” Thank you, Sarah. I was just I was I got more and more stubborn. I ended up getting called on jury duty. I was like, I’m not going to bring my laptop.
I’m just going to go and have my headspace… literally five minutes into me, just like waiting in the jury pool. This idea hit me and I was like, oh, no, no, go away, go away. And like, I just knew I had to do and I knew it was for Sarah’s show.
Like it was just. And so I called up my collaborator, Scott, who I call my art husband. And I was like, Scott, I think I think we need to do this. And I, you know, describe the idea. And he was like, yep, we need to do this.
So we ended up creating that and not just doing that, but one of the things I’d really want to do was build installation space. I’d been inspired by the designer who would create incredible installations for his fashion shows and I was seeing these in like ’99 and 2000 when I was starting college, I always had this feeling
I want to do installation but didn’t have a way in. And I was like, let’s do this as an installation piece. So we created an installation, these two chambers, in the second chamber you could watch the film. We did things like hang like little jars from the ceiling with rosewater and tea light.
So as the tea lights heated up, you would smell the rosewater through the space. So really making it a multisensory experience. We projected the film onto a stretch piece of like cotton fabric with a really nice texture, just like changed up how you would expect to encounter a film.
And that evening, people were leaving, weeping, and I was just like, I think I found it. This is the space I need to be playing in. And that, too, that 2013 is really my full shift into art space.
And it’s a slow shift. You know, I’m kind of slowly pulling away from going, “oh, the film industry is where I have to like make my little home,” to going, “Actually, there’s already a home for me in the art world.”
And understanding of this in a language for this, which if we fast forward even more, leads me to grad school, because something I’d really craved in undergrad and didn’t get was a language for what I was doing, because let’s be honest, it’s niche.
And there’s not many people who have that understanding. That’s not their fault at all. But I wanted to work with people who actually understood it. And so going to UCLA has meant that I’ve gotten to work with people who’ve literally written the book about experimental film and video art, which is amazing.
You know, people whose books I’ve been reading before and now I get to learn from them is really incredible. People like Holly Willis and Rebecca Mendez, who, you know, have worked through this art. And so that was really exciting for me to be able to finally be in an environment where I could show some work. And they had the vocabulary to discuss it with me.
So in this program at UCLA, I do have a question, why higher education? Because like. All right, first, I know personally that you like, soar when it comes to academia like Mr. Perfect Score, like I forget which one it was, was it English? I don’t remember.
It was it was English on the Jerry. Yes. Which turns out UCLA doesn’t even require I was doing that to get into a Ph.D. program at USC. But I didn’t get into that program. I got into UCLA instead.
Tanya: Yeah, you soar at academia. However, I’d venture to say that it’s not entirely the case with a lot of I mean, probably most artists. So why like why higher education? What’s the goal?
Leslie: Yeah, I mean, I think everybody has to take this at their own mileage, but I think especially for artist, academia and higher academia, getting a
grad degree becomes a way to make connections. My rule for myself and I know that this is a privilege and not anybody else can do this, was that I’m not paying for grad school. So I was really grateful to find a program that is fully funded and it’s not fully funded for everybody.
You know, I make that clear. If you’re an international student, you’re definitely paying for it, unfortunately. But if you’re a California resident, it is a fully funded program. And that was great, because I don’t have to accrue debt over this.
And I get to be in this incredible program where I’m meeting all these incredible artists constantly. And so it’s about working with my cohort who are already working artists, many of them, and getting to learn from them as learning from each other.
It’s about us creating work. And the program is built to be more practical. You’re constantly creating. So it is built for artists, you know? Yes, there’s the academic side. But the thing is, is that as you get deeper in the fine art world, academia and art are crossing over like artists are always playing.
You look at the art, especially abstract art and the art that was exploding in the 60s and 70s even before that. And people are playing in conceptual space. They’re dealing with these difficult theoretical ideas and then expressing them in art forms.
And I think often people who are outside of the art world struggle with, you know, stuff that isn’t what they’re used to, figurative kind of representative art. As things become more abstract in the early 20th century. But what’s happening is people are trying to play with these conceptual ideas.
They’re playing with theory, they’re playing with philosophy, and they’re expressing it in art form. So there’s actually a really natural meeting place for artists within academia, and especially a program that I think is built to be able to be conversation about that and then also incorporate your own work and the insistence that you’re still creating work through
this whole thing. I think the other thing is that the nice thing about grad school is there’s a lot less emphasis on grades. The important thing is not the grades at that point. It’s creating the work. You graduate from grad school and nobody’s asking what your GPA from grad school is. Nobody can.
Tanya: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Leslie: You graduated from grad school. You know, you don’t. Honestly, we don’t ask our doctor if they graduated first in their class or like in the middle of the pack or even last, like they’re just they got that MD. That’s the important thing. So there is a different standard of understanding there.
Tanya: So you’re saying like, you know, you’re going there for a lot of the connections, connections for what? What is the goal after this particular goal?
Leslie: That’s a good question. So I’ll speak kind of generally and then about my own kind of path. I think generally you’re looking for and this especially comes in handy when you’re kind of at a bigger name, school, like UCLA, where you’re hoping that, you know, you get to meet curators or gallerists who might be able to forge your career or other artists who are already kind of establishing their name, because the thing is, with a school like that, you never know who’s kind of coming through the hallways or coming to a show, like when UCLA puts on a show.
There are people from around the art world who want to see what’s happening with the students there and will come and see that. And that’s a good chance to make those connections, to forge a career afterwards. A lot of artists make their living in academia and teaching afterwards.
So, you know, most artists have to have day jobs. And I think that’s not a bad thing. And to have a day job that’s within your world, teaching about the art you do can be a really nice, comfortable fit for you to keep doing your practice and then be able to teach.
And I think the art world is a little different from some academia where you’re completely separate from the, you know, the actual field. My dad’s a business professor, for example. You know, he doesn’t run a business. He doesn’t you know, he’s not hanging out in the business world. He’s writing about it. He’s theorizing articles about it. But it’s a different world. Whereas I’d say both like the sciences and art, are deeply enmeshed in each other’s worlds.
The academic world and the science world or the academic world in the art world are sort of the same world. It’s a Venn diagram that’s close to a circle.
Tanya: That’s really, really interesting. Yeah.
Leslie: Yeah, it’s interesting because it makes it a little easier. You don’t feel like, oh, I’m giving up my art to pursue teaching you’re, you know, most art schools are saying you need to be producing art, especially if you’re on a tenure track job, you know, in the way that my dad has to publish articles to try to get tenure as a business professor.
Artists and art schools are having to create work and show that art museums and show that in galleries as part of that tenure process. So your art practice gets enmeshed in that. So a lot of artists do choose to do that.
I’d say that a majority of the artists I know are also teachers in some kind of institution. From community college to public college to private universities.
Tanya: Yeah. So it’s an art form in and of itself.
Leslie: It’s an art form in and of itself. And so for me, I think the door is kind of open on where I’d want to end up. Like I love academia. I wouldn’t mind being adjacent to academia, maybe like a long term art residency at a university.
Sounds really ideal where I get to still interact with students but create my own work. I could also see myself teaching. At this point I have a year left, so I’m really just trying to see what options just kind of emerge.
And the thing is, like, because I already have a job at Level Ground, I’m not necessarily freaking out about like, oh, I’m going to kind of land in this space without work afterwards. Like I can kind of take my time to figure out what I need. And again, that’s, I definitely acknowledge that’s a privilege.
Tanya: We’ll get back to the day job. But I do want to mention that I think that you would be a pretty awesome teacher. Did you know actually that I am in film because of you?
Leslie: Yeah, I do know that which is still wild to me, to be completely honest, completely wild.
Tanya: Yeah, like I’ll catch everybody up. I remember it was it was my first year of college. I had just gotten done doing a music program and did not mesh well with that program. And I was kind of at a loss of what to do and went into some sound recording because I thought like, oh, well, like I’ll record some sound and somehow got into the sound design, which was I learned later that filmmakers hate doing sound. So some of them do anyway. And we were working on like one thing that our school did was or and does is every four years they they try to create a feature or some big project of a magnitude so people can, you know, be a part of a larger project.
And I remember being part of your world for the first time, and I’m just like, man, this is amazing. But I know nothing about film, nothing whatsoever. I would hear terms like F-stop and shutter speed, you know, all the stuff that I had no idea about.
And I remember exactly where we were sitting. We were sitting in the cafeteria and one of the lunch breaks in the summer when we were doing post for this film. And I was like, man, this seems so cool, but I don’t know anything about it.
And you’re just like, I didn’t know anything about I had no idea what F-stop and shutter’s mean, and he’s like, that’s why you come to school. You know, it was like it seems obvious, but, you know, like at that particular time when we were doing academia for for going into film, you know, it was a it was a hump that I didn’t know that I had to get over. And I don’t know. It was just and it was really cool. But in other places that you’ve been extremely helpful is those practical dayjob type tips. Like I remember you were also the first person to tell me about a Roth IRA.
So I’d like to give the listeners a little bit of a peek at what it takes financially to be a filmmaker in experimental art. We’ve talked a little about finances before, and I’ve always appreciated your transparency. So like it would be incredibly difficult to not take those kind of crew jobs and, you know, like that kind of thing, things that would come along. How do you sustain yourself? You already mentioned that you’re not paying for that grad degree. I’m not paying for mine, which, by the way, you know, that’s probably another conversation. But yeah, you guys, if you’re going for a grad degree, there are options. But I would like to know what it takes financially.
Leslie: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, my first years in L.A. were a struggle. You know, I was coming from this job that paid pretty well in London to L.A. where I was having to freelance in the industry.
It was right after the writers strike had ended so jobs were scarce. I realized I just kind of hated being on set a lot of the time. There are really some good days, but a lot of times it just was stressful and awful. And realizing you had to prove yourself to a new group of people every time you got a new gig, you weren’t going back with the same coworkers. You had to kind of start from zero all over again. It got exhausting, but I did that for about two years.
I ended up working as a janitor for six years after that. Not the easiest choice, but a choice that I made because I realized I didn’t have the space to work on my own stuff. And if I was just going to continue being crew, I likely would never have the space to work on what I wanted to do. And so, yeah, it’s one of those scary choices where you feel like I’m in this path on the film industry, and I’m stepping outside of that, because again, then my conception is I have to do this within the film industry, have to get to a place where I can create a bubble in this world.
And so stepping away from that was really scary. But that did allow me to have the space to start the nonprofit and work on that and do that with folks like Adam Buck and Pavol Rutherford, both incredible friends of mine. I needed that space. And so I worked as a janitor for six years as my day job to give myself space. And at that point, the rule became, whatever my job is, it has to give me space for my own practice, for my art practice.
And so from there, I kind of shifted into doing social media six years. And I was I was able to leave that job to do kind of social media management work. And I just kept kind of nudging closer and closer and closer, just like trying to do stuff within the art space itself.
I’d been volunteering at Level Ground for years. The opportunity came along to be their first resident artist. They gave me a nice little chunk of money to create a year’s worth of experimental films. So I did 11 films in 11 months.
Each film could only be fifty-nine seconds long. I also created the rule that I couldn’t collaborate with any cis men. So it just these really interesting kind of projects came along. Hmm. I finished up with Level Ground and sort of had helped them build an idea for a future residency program and thought, well I’m onto the next thing after that. Keep doing social media. And Samantha Curlee, the director of Level Ground, was like, no, no, I want you to now run the program. And it wasn’t a full time job. It still isn’t.
But I’ve been doing that for about five years now. And that was a big help and starting to work fully in Artspace. And so that was kind of my long journey there. But, yeah, financially, I make the joke all the time that I didn’t just have to pick one difficult medium I picked to like film is an incredibly expensive medium. It can be. And I also do installation art, which is incredibly expensive. And I combined them. So I don’t know what I’m doing. But as far as funding, for a while, I was just it took like Ritual Cycle, my first solo show, which opened in 2016.
Took me and my collaborators, Scott and Heather, Dapollonia, who also graduated from Southern, it took us three to four years to finish just because we would shoot something and then save money, save money, save money, save money, and then pull it and then shoot something else.
And the only reason that was able to get done in even just three years was because we’re all three or three people pooling money. Yeah. As I started getting better paying jobs, I was able to kind of like fund myself.
But, you know, that comes at a price. You know, you’re funding it at the expense of a lot of other things in your life because you’re kind of pouring any expendable money outside of that Roth IRA savings. So important folks, especially if you’re an artist.
You know, everything else was going into my work. And so it’s a really it becomes a difficult way to live. So one of the things I did a few years ago was start a patreon. And I don’t get a ton of money off of that.
But I have a really loyal little group of patrons. They get my behind the scenes, they get like a bi monthly newsletter. They get kind of my thoughts about what’s happening through this process. And in return, I get about 220, 230 dollars a month. And that all just gets like I don’t spend that immediately, but I just sits, sits, sits, sits in a cruise. And whenever I a project, I have that to at least start pulling from. I joke that I have a grant curse.
Grants are often the way you fund artwork. In 15 years of writing grants, I’ve never gotten a single grant. So grants have not worked for me historically. So often it’s a combination of Patreon and it’s a combination of a few other things.
But Samantha, my boss at Level Ground, and at this point, a very good friend challenged me at the end of my last big project, which was heavily brown body in 2019, where I spent a ton of my own money for this piece that went up in the Torrens Art Museum. She said, I think you should take the challenge that from here on out, you don’t spend a cent of your own money on your projects anymore. She’s like, it’s time. And so what that’s meant in some ways is I’m downscaling a little bit, like, what are the things I can do with just the money I get in on Patreon with? And that’s a good creative challenge. It hasn’t been an issue. And if I want to do a bigger project, I will wait for that grant or that fellowship or whatever. The nice thing with school is that we also get some stipending for work.
But that’s the question I have to solve. Like I have some ambitious plans. And so I am questioning like where do I get some of that funding from? So that’ll be a question that gets answered. But I’m constantly filling out grant applications, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Just trying to get more money for projects. So a lot of it is about knowing the grant process, getting grants. And again, I’m speaking broadly as an artist, having these alternate streams of income, sometimes it’s funding it yourself.
Something for me that’s the standard, though, is that I will always pay cast and crew. You know, I got past the point where I was asking people to volunteer years ago. I will pay cast and crew. And if there’s a group of collaborators, we will be paid last if paid at all, because it’s not really about it, it’s about creating the work. And most of us will have other incomes that help us kind of survive that. But I want to pay my cast and crew at union rates. I won’t shoot something until I have the funds to do it that at that rate, honestly, and that can be sometimes difficult. And sometimes that means, again, I shoot a smaller project. But something it’s so funny because one of the most successful shorts I’ve had is something that I shot and edited in 48 hours with a zero budget.
Tanya: That’s how it is, isn’t it?
Leslie: I put blood, sweat and tears into some of these projects. Ritual cycle takes three or four years. I don’t think any of the ritual cycle films have been shown in any other. That’s not true. Now they’ve been now they’re starting to get seen in other galleries and places, but it took years for that.
And then a to number one, which is part of a series where I’m just doing these kind of improv, spontaneous films, literally like the day I started submitting it to both gallery shows and film festivals. It just blew up.
And I was like, what? How did this happen? So, you know, it shows also that like a lot of this is that building of experience to that point where I could create something in this fast period of time that I think showed the experience that I have, but also that it doesn’t take a massive budget to necessarily do that. Something else I was going to say, though, is what I love about the art world versus the film world is, you know, with a film, you release a film and a week after its release, it’s old news.
Like it’s what you’re doing next is the question. Yeah. Yeah. The really nice thing about the art world is that your old work is seen as your archive, it’s seen as your catalog. And so if I go to a gallery, they don’t just want to see the thing I’ve been doing. They want to see my whole catalog. And they go, oh, this piece from like five years ago may fit with the theme we’re doing. There’s not this kind of bias towards it being, quote unquote, old. Yeah. It’s just part of your work.
Oh. And maybe that work gets seen. Maybe. Yeah. So there’s there’s yeah. There’s not this bias against like. Well, that’s that’s older work. We don’t want to show that anymore. It’s like, no, this is just work because again, the art world has a habit of showing everything from like a thousand years ago to now.
So there’s not again, this weirdness about, oh, this is a classic or anything. There’s not that language around the way in film. You know, it’s like, oh, we’re having a classic film screening versus this is just a film from this filmmaker’s body of work.
Tanya: Would you say that that’s kind of an option for potential passive income, like does it ever become profitable? Is it something that, you know, would provide financially, possibly in the future?
Leslie: Let’s say a museum wants to buy a piece of my work. They can go through my catalog and maybe they say we’d like to buy the Ritual Cycles and have those as our collection. That potentially is a way for income. It’s a rare thing. I don’t think it’s to be expected.
But it is a way to do that. And that’s probably the easiest way for an experimental filmmaker to have work sold in that particular way. You know, I also have works that are being distributed by like one of my pieces is distributed by REVERY, which is an LGBTQ+ streaming network.
And that split among the cast, my producer and myself. And we get something like nine dollars every quarter. So we’re like, it’s a joke. Bill Viola, for example, is considered one of the most successful experimental filmmakers and video artist and kind of art history.
And he sold a piece to the Guggenheim Museum for, I think, $300000, which I think is the most expensive or. Yeah, it’s the highest price tag that’s been attached to a piece of video art in history. Obviously, that’s a route you could go.
But again, that’s not to be expected. If you’re looking to have a gallery represent you at that point, they really can’t sell video art. That’s really difficult because most collectors aren’t going to want to buy that. And then you, as the artists also have to make the decision, like, do I want to give up the rights to this? Like, does this person not fully own this or am I going to create additions? You get this thumb drive with this art and you get one of three. But I retain the original edition. Like, that’s the way to think about it, potentially.
So you have to kind of think through what you want. But a lot of galleries are going to say they want like objects along with that. So and this is already naturally a part of my process. But I like creating objects. And I haven’t done this a ton in my work in a way that objects are sellable. But I’m getting more and more towards that where like I’m creating objects that maybe like will display the film or be part of the installation. And then afterwards I could if I had a gallery relationship and if I wanted to go this way, I could say, oh, you get to buy this object that was part of this show. And this art object kind of stands on its own.
And so that could be a way to kind of make money. But for me, really, I think my interest is less in the kind of financial aspect. You know, I don’t ever expect to sell something to a museum for tons of money. I want to get in place where my practice is sustainable. And that looks different for everybody, means I can just keep creating my work and have my needs funded and taken care of. And also and this is the important thing for me.
Have enough money to be able to take care of other people. I think that’s super important. And I think a frustrating thing kind of in the past was going, oh, that person needs help and I’m in just as bad a situation. So I really can’t. But I would love to be able to help out to be in a place where and I’m getting closer to that now, which is really nice, where I can go, oh, I don’t even have to blink
here, take this. Here’s an here’s either money or here’s, you know, something that will provide you material benefit that I can give you. So that’s important. But that doesn’t have to come from my work specifically. I do want it to come from within the art world, that if there was a goal at the end of my grad school that I can kind of specified that I want to work within the art world, whatever that looks like. Maybe that’s academia, maybe that’s what the museum space. But I want like my money to be coming from the same place where I’m creating my work.
Tanya: When you curate projects or shows, what do you look for in the artists? Like what is something that you will never work with versus something that you look for?
Leslie: That second question? I don’t know if I can answer that, but never work with. Hmm. That’s not true. I think the one thing I would say is I wouldn’t include art that I feel like punches down and hurts people who are marginalized. That’s maybe my one barrier. Like beyond that, I’m like, bring it on. Let’s see what you’ve got. And I want to consider things on a piece by piece basis.
Tanya: I guess I’m talking about like technical, not technical skill, as in. But I’m just like last time we talked to, you know, a rigging grip. And he was just like, you got to know your knots, you know, like what is that kind of equivalent of? Just like. Yeah. I mean, like you have amazing work BUT, you know, and I don’t know if there is a but in the art…
Leslie: I don’t know if there’s a but either I actually don’t, like, and this is why I say it’s a piece by piece kind of evaluation. It’s going. That piece works. Let’s include that. Like it really has to be like at this kind of my new level. It’s really hard to kind of have any kind of sweeping statements like, oh, oh, this artist is, you know.
Great with visuals, but for some reason has terrible sound quality. I don’t know, maybe that terrible sound really works in an installation. And like I’m maybe I’m doing an installation where I have like noise music in one corner and I have stuff and like maybe this artist didn’t intend it, but like I get to put it there. And it creates a really intense dissonance that’s working for me as a curator. So, you know, it’s hard to make kind of hard and fast rules like that. And I’m just kind of pulling that example from the air.
There is a songwriting bug who is basically laying out that there are craft writers and there are inspiration writers like the inspiration ones, that they’ll wait for 10 years before they can, you know, create like the perfect album.
Right. And that’s why the first one is always genius. And then the second one when they only have a year to make something. It’s just crap, because then you’re like, oh, all of a sudden I have to write something.
Leslie: And I don’t know. I am guessing that there does kind of sort of have to be a balance sometimes in the art world between, you know, earning your living and making sure that you show up on time or, you know, like if you’re I don’t know if you’re flake or, you know, of that kind of thing versus, you know, like being able to create on your own time because, you know, everybody’s got to eat.
I mean, yes, I think don’t be a flake. Absolutely. Be consistent. Be on time. Show up. But there are so many artists who have gotten away with that for any number of reasons. Right. Who have almost built that into their personality. I have friends like that who I adore, whose work I would absolutely curate. But I also know it’s going to be a real pain to work with this person because they are definitely going to be 30 minutes late to every meeting.
Yeah. The work is so good and I just have to work around that. So it really is so situational in this context. I mean, I have my base of advice like, please don’t be that person. Please don’t do that. Please don’t. But I also like I know people who make it work for them. I don’t know if one day that’s going to bite them in the butt, it might, it might not. I think you have to kind of balance it out.
Like if you are a person who kind of is a little flaky and is like the loveliest person on earth who makes good art, great. If you’re flaky and make good art, but you’re really mean, I don’t know if it’s worth it for me at least to work with you. Yeah, but you were saying kind of what I’m broadly looking for, really, when I’m curating a show, I’m interested in the story that I’m telling. Like I see it often as someone composing a symphony, like here are my violins. So this is how this flows, to here are my cellos. Here’s my percussion. Here’s my woodwind here, my horns. And how do I tie that to get this? That when you went to the gallery, you move through a narrative. And I don’t want it to be kind of a narrative that hits you in the head, but there is a flow that pulls you through the installation or the space or the exhibition. And so I’m constantly thinking about like the flow.
So, you know, I’m just always putting it up and putting it down. Often what we’ll do as well, when you’re setting up a show, you put everything kind of on the floor. So you kind of just really easily move around the studio here.
This should go here even when I’m curating and I don’t do it that often. I don’t consider myself a curator as much as I’ll do it once or twice a year and kind of dip my toe into that space. But once I have all the artwork, I’ll often just spend hours, just like with my eyes closed, picturing the space, picturing where the art is, walking myself through the space and thinking about how everything kind of connects and is in conversation with each other.
Tanya: In this particular community, where would somebody who’s just starting out like is there is a Twitter community? Is there like magazine subscriptions or Reddit community? Like where would they find others?
Leslie: Right. I’m sure there is. All of those things I think can be really difficult. This is the honest truth, like it took me years. Like I moved to L.A. in 2008. And it really wasn’t until 2013, 2012, 2013, where I start really starting making inroads within the art world. And to be honest, part of it was that I didn’t know what I was looking for in that.
And I think maybe if I had it have been a little easier, but I’m not sure about that. There’s one of the things we’re trying to solve with Level Ground by having a community for people who are emerging, artists who don’t necessarily have communities to be able to tie them into community and then connect them with our communities. So we see this as a hub where once you’re in something, you have access to my network and you have access to the 70 other artists networks. And suddenly all the networks have a central meeting place. And because I think things are so spread apart and disparate, and I’m speaking specifically from an L.A. context, I can’t speak to a New York context. I think it might be different in that case. I don’t fully know. I know that has a much more established, visible art scene, but I… from at least what I’ve heard, it can be difficult to work your way in without having kind of the right connections.
And what I found in the L.A. art scene, it is a very open arms art scene, and you just have to find your opening into that. I think as it gets more visible, that becomes easier. But I mean, some of the advice I give young artists is if there’s a gallery creating work that you like and feels resonates with your own work and you kind of imagine yourself being in that gallery one day, show up at every opening. Talk to the galleries, talk to the curator, ask good questions, make yourself a known entity. These days one part of that is like taking a picture or a few things for, you know, your stories and Instagram. At the gallery, tagging the gallery, making them aware that you were there, you were interested in the work. I think all that becomes a part of kind of making yourself a known entity in that world and it’s not easy work.
It’s sometimes slow. You keep showing up at those places. You’re going to keep seeing some of the same people like it’s so funny. Now I’ll go to art shows and I know that there’s going to be these three or four people who are consistently going to be there.
And like you all get to know each other in that way and you start realizing how small the world actually is. But it kind of takes just showing up and showing up and showing up.
Tanya: Alright. Now we’re going to ask about some tools of your trade. What we usually ask is, you know, the kind of like what gear or gadget is an old reliable? What’s a reliable resource?
Leslie: All right, here we go. Evernote. Evernote.
Tanya: Ooh, OK.
Leslie: Evernote is an application that allows you to make lists and notes. And honestly, it helps save one life. It helps me keep organized. I have lists of my lists, but it helps me kind of think through everything, especially in preproduction, which I’m sure you’ve heard people say on this podcast before. Preproduction is the most important part of any project that doesn’t change doing art stuff, even in the stuff that’s supposed to be spontaneous. The most time I spend on that is preproduction just to make sure that I have the space for spontaneity.
But it means, yeah, I’m constantly doing lists like what are the things I need to accomplish today towards this and what are the things I need to accomplish tomorrow. And so just having things in visual form on paper, as it were in front of me, that I can kind of move through, gives me a good living record of the project and allows me to make sure things aren’t falling through the cracks.
Tanya: I do remember I remember having ever know a while ago, and I like I have just like notes now, you know, like the Apple notes. And I was just kind of curious, what’s a what’s a notable difference between the two? Like, why would you go with Evernote and not like notes? Because like I remember Evernote when they first allowed you to draw on it. And I was like, oh, this is amazing, Notes needs this. And then I got it. And then, you know, random stuff like that.
Leslie: I think it’s organizational. Like I’m able to like have notebooks. And then within that I have specific notes so I can kind of really organize as neatly as I want, and then just kind of the functionality of how I arrange those notes. It can also you can kind of connect it with like your Google Drive. And so I can, you know, have my notes and I can connect to a document and Google so I can just kind of have that cross functionality.
That’s really nice. A decade and a half ago would have been my notebook and now it’s become Evernote, but that really is reliable. It’s not necessarily a piece of gear.
Tanya: What about your new gadget that revolutionizes how you work?
Leslie: I’d say a new thing would be Fusion 360, which is a 3D design software that is designed specifically for being able to mill and 3D print. So you’re kind of building to exact specifications and it’s built with those tools in mind. So if I want to build something on a sand khtml, I can design it that way so that the mill is speaking the same language as the program.
Same thing with 3D printing. And that’s been a really good way to create objects for my installations, one but two. It’s also a good way to just layout my installation, because I can do it with exact measurements and I can set up kind of a rough gallery set up and I can set up where my projectors are, the throws and everything. And that’s a really great preproduction visualization tool. So both creating objects, but also for previs. Yeah, it’s very similar to CAD. And I believe Fusion 360 is actually created by AutoCAD. So it’s in that family of.
Yeah. And then I’d say the other thing that is becoming I wouldn’t say a standard, but it’s a new tool that I’m enjoying is processing. Processing is code language coding language that was written specifically for artists. It’s really enjoyable to use.
Sometimes is like, have a hard time wrapping my head around it. Like I think code logic can be so complex and intricate. But yeah, it’s a really approachable language and it was taught very well. And again, talking about the access right at UCLA, I was able to learn the program from Casey Reas, who’s one of the people who like designed the language. And is a software artist. Right. So I get to see like the incredible and I say definitely look up Casey Reas. His work is beautiful. But that’s kind of the stuff that I’m so thinking about, like how do I integrate this into my work?
I’m going to be working with Gina Caravalo, who’s a professor in the department with learning mocap software soon. I’m thinking about how do I integrate this into my work? Yeah. How does volumetric capture get integrated in my work?
Do I want to integrate in my work? Yeah, I’m excited to learn and then kind of see if it becomes a worthwhile addition to my work. So this is all kind of the new stuff that I’m really kind of having fun playing with.
Yeah. Now that we’re back on campus, which is nice, I have access to our fabrication lab. And so I’ve been getting retrained into things like table saws and like miter saws and like and they have like massive, you know, power tools that are really exciting to me, too, as an installation maker.
Tanya: Man, if it comes to mocap stuff, call up Jim Turner.
Leslie: True enough. True enough.
Tanya: Yeah. Yeah. He was working on that on on Avatar, he was he was talking to us about it from an episode way back. But dude, the possibilities within art would just be limitless.
Leslie: Exactly.
Tanya: Oh, my gosh. That would be incredible. So this is quickly becoming one of my favorite questions. I love to hear stories about when things went wrong, when something went wrong, and what you did to fix it or grow from it.
Leslie: The funny thing is, as soon as you say that. So many stories come to mind because everything always goes wrong. I don’t know if I’ve been on a project or something didn’t go wrong. I was shooting something that’s actually part of a show.
That’s coming up in about two weeks for me. Our grad preview show is what we call it at UCLA. But I was shooting two films for that. The second film I shot at the beginning of this year, and I got in this location that I was really excited about this beautiful kind of hillside location in Malibu.
You know, we’re shooting with Covid, so I really want to be outside. And the day before the shoot location called me and said, we’ve got to cancel. We’ve had some issues on the property and we have to fix them. And we can’t let you shoot here. Yeah. And so I had to scramble and less than 24 hours find a new location. And it completely changed the texture of the film. Absolutely. 100 percent different film. And maybe better for it, honestly.
Ultimately, I kind of look I look at the film now and I’m like, I can’t imagine it being a different way. Oh, yeah. So many stories. A lot of them are about location cancelations, honestly, or space cancelations.
My second solo show, 59, were that project with 11, 59 second films. We had this gallery that honestly has been my dream gallery since I moved to L.A. Urban Outfitters has a gallery in downtown Hollywood. It’s a gorgeous gallery, glass like Windows, I should say, on one side of it. It’s less light in passersby. It can see what’s happening. The gallery, it’s beautiful. I was going to show the films. They were going to create these installations and have kind of reclaimed windows. They were going to hang throughout the space to create these like transparent chambers. Yeah. Three weeks before the show, the gallery pulls out. And so, again, we have to scramble and not just scramble the location that I end up getting. This great space called Ariel House can’t accommodate the installation we’re thinking about.
So I had to completely redesign the installation, completely do something from scratch that was very different. And we ended up using the windows as like we hung them for credits, but we couldn’t kind of make chambers out of them because of the way the ceiling worked.
So we just could like place directly on the wall. And so we just use them to kind of do the credits for each of the films. But then I took a bunch of these wooden pallets and I ripped them apart and it’s like took a week and a half or so. And then I built them into these viewing stands for the screens and kind of did a simple installation that way. But yeah, things are always going wrong. In the midst of it I’ll tell people, and like often their reaction is, “It’s fine. You’ll get through this. You’ll make it work.” And my response is always, “I might not make it work.” And that’s OK, too. Like it’s sometimes OK if things completely fall apart, like it doesn’t feel good. But I think we are so uncomfortable with this idea of like something fully collapsing and what we think of as failure that we don’t want to acknowledge that when somebody else kind of shares that something might fall apart. Like, “No, no, no. You’ll be fine.” And so I do try to push back and go, it might not be fine. It might actually completely fall apart.
And I will have to deal with what that feels like at that end. So far, I’ve been mostly lucky in that things haven’t completely fallen apart. But like I was mentioning before, I had a nonprofit that completely fell apart. You know, I wasn’t able to rescue that. Good things came of that down the road. But, you know, wasn’t this immediate like, oh, we turned it around. There was a success story. There isn’t a success story there. And I think that’s OK.
Tanya: I feel like that’s something that artists can actually do really well, which is which is adapt. You know, those happy accidents that kind of turn into I mean, I think of just like drawing and sketching and, you know, some- some thing might go out of line and then you just kind of like fill it in. So it’s like it just might be broader than what you thought it was going to be that particular stroke, but. Right. Yeah, I think that rolling with the punches, artists are kind of prewired to do in some ways.
Leslie: We really are. This is a broad statement. And I will just go ahead and apologize to filmmakers upset by this. But kind of one of my jokes is that the thing that I realized in shifting from the film industry.
To the art world, and this is I’m speaking very broadly, is that so many people I encountered here in L.A. in the film industry. We’re so sure that they were going to be successful. They’re going to make it, they’re going to be a name like they have this deep belief in that.
And the art world, none of us think we’re going to be successful. And there’s a very there’s a very different attitude that happens in that previous attitude. There almost this desperation starts happening as you start moving through life, and maybe that success isn’t coming in the way that you thought it would.
It makes it harder to acknowledge the success that has emerged in your life, because you had this one vision that you’re stuck on. When you’re coming from a place where you’re like, I don’t know, I probably won’t make it, then any success feels exciting.
And I mean, I don’t know if that’s necessarily a healthier thing, but I do appreciate that point of view, because it does make me more open to appreciating like the successes. Like I don’t think I’m ever going to be at the Guggenheim or, you know, the MoMA or Serpentine Gallery in London. If I get there, it will be a really exciting surprise.
Tanya: I mean, I think there can be a good, healthy blend of both, you know, because I mean, there is one thing of that, you know, being able to roll with the punches and adapt to the things that have fallen through. This podcast is like happened because of that. You know, there’s there’s lots of stuff where you can you can have those images, because I know that you are. I mean, you say like, oh, yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be great everything.
But I also know you to be extremely like self driven and like headed towards a direction like, you know what I mean? Like, I don’t like you floating by any means.
Leslie: No, no. And I don’t feel I’m I’m here’s the thing is, for me, I guess what I should say is for me, success looks like creating the work that I want to create. Anything beyond that is wonderful. But it’s not necessarily this. I think what I mean is this kind of idea of commercial and visible success. I don’t expect that that’s not for me.
Success is continuing to be able to create the work that I want to create. Anything beyond that is a really great thing. And I love.
Tanya: What current projects are you excited about?
Leslie: So by the time this is going to air, I will have just wrapped up my grad show, which is work that I’ve been doing over the past year that I have been very excited about. But work that I am thinking about now is my thesis project. Like, that’s what I get to think about for the next year. And that’s really exciting. And I really want to combine a lot of the stuff I’m learning.
If I was going to describe my work, I would say that I am exploring black queer futures through a lens of dream logic. I think dreams give us a really wonderful space to explore, an open space up for us to think about better worlds and better futures or alternate worlds and alternate futures, things that are different from kind of the paths we think we might be stuck on. I’m always thinking about one of the reasons installation space is important to me is I’m thinking about how do we bring dream space into waking life? How do we how do I bring dream space into a gallery?
And suddenly, I hope that if you enter one of my chambers, I’m messing with things just enough that you feel a little off kilter in the way that dreams do and really wonderful ways. So I really want to kind of combine all of that and hopefully a fresh way with my thesis.
So I’m really excited about combining all those ideas. I’ve been doing tons of research on things like West African ritual and tradition and the way that combined with Protestant traditions during antebellum times, with enslaved people, how they sort of subverted Protestant religion with their own kind of beliefs, this religion that kind of was forced on them by plantation owners, how they move through space, the ideas that they created, geographies that look different from these geographies of the plantation, and how we can maybe take lessons from that today, how they built kind of better worlds and little pockets for themselves.
I’m researching that. I’m reading a lot about Afro pessimism and black optimism and black futurity and queer futurity. So all the stuff that’s like wonderfully heady and academic, I’m trying to boil down into visual language, into poetic cinema for myself, and then create space where anybody can kind of walk in and they’re not confronted with like a wall of words, but they get these images that create, affect, create emotion that will take you on a journey.
Tanya: Mm hmm. And what is your hope? What is your dream like? What does your dreamscape for this particular project, what it would accomplish?
Leslie: I create space where you feel like you have permission to dream about better worlds and then start building those and be part of building those. Like, what is it like to come into the space and go, wait? Maybe things can look differently.
And I’m not interested in kind of creating shiny sci fi visuals. That’s what I’m interested, but I’m talking about. What does fairness look like in different worlds? Who are the people that are represented, who shows up? How do things feel like?
You know, I’m much more interested in the more kind of internal worlds of what better futures look like. Yeah, maybe that’s shiny skyscrapers. I don’t know. That’s not particularly my interest. I’m interested in kind of the dream space of future worlds and what that feels like.
So, yeah, hopefully and inviting you into those spaces. You get charged up with an idea. You feel like you can start creating pathways. I think I have this concept that like the best thing I can do is just leave my little part of a pathway that people can keep building on.
So hopefully this is my part of building that pathway. Then other people can join and add their bricks to that pathway.
Tanya: So how do people find and follow this work?
Leslie: You can find me at lesliefoster.art, super easy. I’m also leslie_muse on Instagram. And those are the easiest places to find my work. And I believe you can find me at patreon.com/lesliefoster.
Tanya: Awesome. And I always wrap up with this question. What questions should I have asked you?
Leslie: Something I’m thinking about is whether we actually defined experimental film for people. Hmm. I don’t know that we did. So if I was going to define experimental film, because I think it’s important for folks to kind of have a framework for this.
I love this definition from elements of cinema because it’s a little snarky. So I’m going to go ahead and read this and kind of add my own context. Elements of cinema says, “Also known as avant garde experimental films are rare and totally unpopular. Some people may spend their entire lives without ever catching a glimpse of an experimental movie. Most will never sit through one. As the word experimental suggests. This type of movie is trying something new, different, so different that at first it will cause confusion, if not annoyance, on the viewer. In simple terms, experimental films are incredibly easy to define, but quite difficult to understand, since most people have no preconception of what they are. Imagine a movie that has neither narrative nor documentary. What remains chaos, disorder and coherence. Like any other art form, cinema can also be a therapeutic activity. This is not to imply that those who make them are ill or demented. Not at all. However, some directors are not concerned about what people may think or commercial success. Again, experimental films are not imprisoned by story structure, character or common sense.”
I love that definition. Despite the snarkiness, I think it gives you an idea of this. I’d say experimental film falls into kind of two major schools. And one is where artists like Stan Brakhage were like actively messing with the medium itself.
Stan Brakhage would expose pieces that come to light and scratch it and play with it and actually change the physical media. And you see this now with people kind of coating the film and messing with film and playing with distortion and the grain and kind of actually impacting kind of the structure. We’d say the formal aspects of the film itself. And then you have experimental film that’s more conceptual, may use any range of objects, but it’s not so much concerned with kind of messing with the physical form of the film or the digital film, as it were, but with kind of playing with weird conceptual kind of ideas.
And then, of course, you have plenty of merging. There’s not really a binary there, plenty of those crossover. I also see film kind of under that. Those films can kind of occupy two spaces. One is ambient narrative. And this idea of narrative that just kind of fills space that isn’t kind of your traditional A.B.C. narrative, but one that’s more poetic and then spatial narrative where you have multiple screens that are kind of in dialog with each other. And I really love playing with spatial narrative where you have kind of multiple pieces of media that all kind of connect a space and suddenly you get something that’s much larger than the sum of its parts.
Tanya: Would they consider, you know, something like Baraka or, you know, Tree of Life…
Leslie: Terrence Malik’s Tree of life, Baraka? I would absolutely consider these long form experimental work. I think most of Terence Malik’s films fit into that. And it’s interesting is like experimental filmmakers like Doug Aikin, who almost exclusively works within gallery context and museum context, often will use known faces, known entities. There are these experimental filmmakers who are working with kind of more famous people. Matthew Barney, you know, works with people like Paul Giamatti in his work, you know, so I think there is definitely like some interesting crossover there.
Music video speak the same language of experimental filmmaking. Most music videos do. Most music videos come from that same world. And that means that they’re not narrative. They’re non-linear. They’re playing in that space. So if you have grown up watching music videos, you already have a bit of a vocabulary of experimental film.
And I think that’s a really exciting thing to start understanding that you can actually walk into a gallery that’s showing experimental film and have at least the basic grammar already in your mind because of music videos, because they’re playing in that same world.
I’d also say if you’re interested in diving at a good place to start is with Terence Nance’s, Random Acts of Flyness on HBO, which is a six episode series of experimental films, all kind of woven together. And it’s brilliant.
Tanya: Amazing. Thank you. If you enjoyed this interview, follow us right here and on Instagram, ask us questions and check out more episodes at thepracticalfilmmaker.com. Be well, and God bless. We’ll see you next time on The Practical Filmmaker.