Jordan Baseman's current practice investigates ideas surrounding contemporary portraiture, narrative structure, the manipulation of recorded information, authenticity, animation and documentary.
The films that he makes focus primarily on belief systems and lived experience. In recent years he has been working with and recording people in order to produce documentary-style films that have both the interview and editing processes at their core. The final works are narrative films, and/or sound works, that are presented as single-screen installations.
Oral history, spoken word, field-recording, and recorded observational study are areas from which he draws inspiration for his work. The films that he produces have something very real at their foundations: however edited, constructed or manipulated the final work may be, the source, the starting point, the genesis, is always rooted in reality: not in artifice. He is interested in the synthesis of reportage, portraiture, documentary, creative non-fiction, and narrative practices.
He is curious about how we record ourselves: how we visually and conceptually represent our lives and our relationship to the world around us, how we evidence, construct and describe our reality through creating and using moving images.
His films seek to entertain, to enlighten and to emotionally engage and challenge audiences. Although the work is placed within a fine-art context, and positioned within the current academic research culture, he does not feel that it is restricted to those environments and to those debates alone. It is important to me that my work does not operate exclusively within those environs and for those audiences. he tries to create work that seeks to transcend the arena within which it is placed in order to encompass wider spheres of reference and culture, and therefore have wider appeal.
Narration, storytelling, personal experience and belief interest him a great deal. The unpredictability of the interview situation excites him a great deal. Speculation, opinion, ideas and anecdotes hold far more fascination for him than factual discussion, proof, or the academic dissemination of known information. Our constantly shifting relationship with personal, social and shared history are of great importance to him as an artist.