We have worked many years with Taller Puertorriqueño documenting their regular exhibitions which rotate several times during the year. Wilderness In Mind an exhibition of artworks by Venezuelan artist Henry Bermudez is the latest exhibit at their gallery on North 5th Street which was open to the public and ran from February 8 through May 2, 2020.
The first part of the documentation work was to take photos of the gallery space and the installation of the work. This was done right before the exhibition opened to the public and the photos were used to promote the opening reception as well as other programming related to the show. The exhibition is almost like a mini-retrospective of Henry’s work since its spans more than a decade of his most recent work.
Using HDR techniques to take the photos yielded the best colors and detail of the works. This is essential to document exhibitions like this because of the high contrast between where the lights are on the artwork and the wall. Thankfully nothing was moving so it made it easier to use HDR and once in post, color and light could be adjusted to yield the most faithful images to the original artworks.
The opportunity arose to document the exhibit through video since of the outbreak of COVID-19 that took over the globe and the social distancing measures had to be put in place by our local government. The social distancing measures were put into place shortly after the exhibition opened and in order to get the exhibit to a wider audience, because the exhibit had to close prematurely, Taller contacted us about on producing a video tour of the exhibit that included excerpts of a panel discussion that happed concurrently with the show.
The video was filmed in one production day starting with an artist interview in his backyard. We interviewed Henry there in order to keep a safe distance not be in a confined space or the gallery using a telephoto lens and a shotgun mic that had a really good sound pickup pattern. Thankfully we had the space to work with.
The challenge of doing anything outdoors is that you have to work with the sun, clouds, cars, birds, cats, trains, neighbors, all of them creating disruptions that require you to pay more attention to the surroundings.
Once we were all satisfied with the interview material, we headed over to film the exhibition installation. Here the challenge was the lighting of the artwork because of the contrast. But because everything was recorded in C-LOG it was more flexible to work with in post. C-LOG is way better to work with, but the color correction of it adds a significant amount of time to the post.
Client:
Production:
Colibri Workshop
Camera work:
Gustavo Garcia
Editing:
Gustavo Garcia, Rafael Damast
