As usual I am a little late with this. Doug Beube, a Canadian who hails from Brooklyn, was our resident artist back in April and May.
He was here for 7 weeks and boy did we learn alot about "bookarts". We discovered Doug's work in a book I got Ellen for her birthday. She is a super map geek and Katharine Harman's The Map as Art is dinner and dessert for a map geek. It was like finding a whole new world of art. Doug is a mixed media artist and although his MFA is in photography, his prime focus currently is bookarts. Among other things he is the curator of a private collection in New York City entitled, The Allan Chasanoff Bookworks Collection: The Book Under Pressure and his time here at Cassilhaus was spent working on a commission for Mr. Chasanoff. Doug was the first artist we invited who was a complete unknown to us and there was excitement and a bit of risk in that--fortunately he turned out not be a hamster strangler!
I have given up predicting what will and will not happen during residencies here but I must say zipper dyeing was not even on my radar.
In addition to dyeing the zippers Doug needed to shorten them by painstakingly removing metal teeth.
Doug did a piece for fellow Canadian artist k.d. Lang called The Many Lives of Miss Chatelaine which was one of his first to incorporate zippers as a low tech method of "cutting and pasting" sections of the "book" and allowing quick rearrangement.
When we first talked to Doug about coming to Cassilhaus he said he would need a shop with a dust capture system for his physical manipulation work on books. We contacted our good friends at the UNC Art Department, Jim Hirschfield (chair) and Jeff Whetstone and they put us in touch with Pat Day at the UNC Art Lab which turned out to be a fabulous resource. UNC has been a great collaborator for us with our residency.
In this particular project, Doug has placed a plastic "resist" at a certain point within the book and is grinding a large hole through the cover of the book and down into the pages. He will then begin to develop the interior content. He has a fascinating method of developing a new narrative from the existing text of the book by highlighting certain words using painting and drawing.
Each section can now be moved around to change the narrative.
Doug gave a wonderful artist talk near the end of his stay where he showed works in progress and talked about his photographic, sculpture, and bookarts work.
The main thrust of what we are doing here at Cassilhaus is trying to engage the local arts community with our resident artists. It was particularly exciting that Doug's talk connected us with a vibrant (and unknown to us) books arts scene in the Triangle and specifically a newly formed books arts group of artists, many of whom were in attendance. We are continually finding new constituencies that bring new energy to Cassilhaus. Thanks Doug.
Only common things come when common sense prevails. --Anonymous
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