#SPOTLIGHT ON AYMAR JEAN CHRISTIAN
How did you come of age as an artist? How did you come to your current practice?
My art practice has always been rooted in development, cultivating a producing video projects with and for other artists. I view development as an art form when it's at the indie level. It's creative work to find the right people to take on a project and envision the final form by knowing what each person will bring. OTV itself is a creative project I started to test out development-as-art-practice and Hair Story is OTV's most ambitious project to date in terms of collaborative series production.
What was the inspiration for your OTV project?
Hair Story takes me back to the origins of OTV. I moved to Chicago knowing little except that I wanted to do innovative research and find community. For more than a year I was lost, depressed, and lonely because my partner was in Hollywood and I was in an intellectual slump trying to transform my dissertation into the book. I slowly found my way out of this depression by finding queer community through Chicago’s art and nightlife. The core creative team are all people who were critical collaborators when I started OTV and inspired this project: Erik Wallace was the first person I reached out to about any creative involved with OTV, and their performance and music inspired our first pilot, Nupita Obama, from which Hair Story is a spin-off. Saya Naomi's drag and skill in gender transformation and non-conformity is at the heart of OTV's mission, and she brings both to both Nupita and this new project. Kiam Junio, the other Nupita star, has their art in Hair Story. Elijah McKinnon, the first person to join the OTV core team, art directed this series; their series, Good Enough, is the first spin-off of Hair Story and has already been filmed! It looks amazing.
What's next for you or your series?
Hair Story is an ambitious experiment in queer TV development: a series of pilots about intersectional characters. In the full series, each episode focuses on one of the co-op residents and we follow them in their everyday lives and jump into their dreams. We see these dreams and histories as characters talk to Gia while she does their hair. Inspired as I was by dreaming while running to music, I imagine these worlds as music videos embedded in a serial narrative, but that may vary based on each artist’s vision and resources. Each episode will have the same cinematographer but different directors and creative teams. Characters may show up in other series, or not. The relations in the show will be as organic as relationships in the real world.
