Artist Reflections: Jack Wingate
Jack Wingate joined us as a Resident Artist for Artsfest summer 2024. Check out this video he made alongside our campers! Below, he reflects on his time during his residency that summer.
When I arrived at Camp Stomping Ground I was excited about the prospect of teaching and to retreat to my cabin every night and write. I had coming-of-age stories that had missing gaps in them. How did young characters talk to each other? How did they react to conflict? But, when a week went by and I hadn’t written a scratch, I decided to further connect with my campers through interviews.
But, it was easy to get swept up in the fun, eventful camp life.
I think first and foremost Camp Stomping Ground AIR is a residency to meet like-minded artists of other disciplines. Since there is only one artist for each discipline, I spent most of my time asking artists and staff about their artistic practices and backgrounds. No longer was I just around other filmmakers as is the norm in the field of filmmaking but instead painters, musicians, writers, scholars, and more. My resulting video was heavily influenced by hearing about other disciplines and their backgrounds over breakfast, lunch, or dinner at the staff table behind the cafeteria where we ate every day.
My students were brilliant, talented, and most of all excited about filmmaking.
So, with an interest in exploring aesthetics and themes around growing up, I interviewed my students. I asked them what felt natural at the time, what they thought of school, if they had a best friend, what they wanted to do next school year.
The visuals don’t attempt to be technically fluent but instead come from the silliness that is picked up from being around kids all day. Shots were filmed sleight of hand and with just an immediate interest in my surroundings. If colors excited me they were filmed and if a camera motion felt good it was taken.
While editing I sought to create a collage of colors, textures, and emotions influenced by the editing styles of Peter Tscherkassky and Michael Snow (but digital rather than analog). I hope that the audience transitions from emotion to emotion as seamlessly (or sometimes non-seamlessly) as the visuals do.
I became increasingly interested in the idea of having a best friend. It was a set of words said so commonly among campers. If my short video has any meaning it's for adults to remember having a best friend and what that felt like. Ultimately, what came of it was not only the piece of work I put together but also a stronger relationship with my students which I find very valuable as I continue down this path as a teacher.
Camp Stomping Ground reminded me of an artistic principle that is easily forgotten in filmmaking: the process is always more important than the outcome. The process of Camp Stomping Ground AIR is stripped down, unpretentious, and so pure that it may be easy to overlook.
After all, we are just six artists teaching at a kids' summer camp. But through this experience, we remember the inherent good of an art practice and ultimately why many of us chose this path in life.
Jack Wingate is a queer filmmaker born in Tallahassee, Florida where he attended Florida State University, and now is living in Brooklyn. Wingate was selected as a 2021 Parlamentarisches Patenschafts-Programm Fellow in Germany.
During his tenure, Wingate created his first short film Studio Ukraine which screened internationally, including at the 2023 South Georgia Film Fest, the 2023 Berlin Between Bridges Exhibition, and the 2023 New York Short Film Fest, where he was a finalist. He is an Associate Producer on Leah Galant’s Landscapes of Memory, an experimental feature film about memorialization culture supported by Jewish Story Partners, the Fulbright Scholar Program, and recently pitched at Hot Docs Forum. Wingate is currently in post-production on his first narrative short, Undies, and in pre-production on his second documentary short.
