Cassilhaus

Michael Prince

I love how things just sometimes organically happen here at Cassilhaus and the micro-artist residency with Gloucester, MA based photographer Michael Prince was a spectacular happening. I was working with our intern Lisa McCarty last year to attach digital images of each of the artworks in our collection to our collection spreadsheet.  There were a few images I did not already have or that we couldn't find on the web and an image of one of Michael's photographs I purchased in 1999 was among the ones we needed to track down.  I hadn't ever met Michael but I contacted him through his website and asked him to send me a jpeg. He shared a devastating story-certainly every photographers worst nightmare-that his entire archive of negatives had been destroyed by a flood in his house while he was away on a commercial shoot in Asia. In the ultimate lemonade from lemons story, while combing through thousands of damaged negatives, he found a few--a very small few--where he felt the damage gave the images a new life.  He cleaned them and scanned them and he sent me jpegs jokingly calling them his "flood" series.

I thought they were stunning!  I asked him if he had shown the work anywhere and he said he really hadn't had much time for many years for his personal work and hadn't really thought about an exhibition.  I impulsively asked him if he wanted to be a resident at Cassilhaus and do a show in the gallery. 

He offered that I would be a very unpopular man with both his wife and his agent if I attempted to sequester him at Cassilhaus for a month but we schemed up the first ever 5 day micro artist residency here with an opening of 4 of his bodies of personal work including the flood series and an artist talk.  He sent the work in advance.  Ellen and I selected the work, put the show together, and then I had it framed locally.

Ellen's brother and sister-in-law were visiting from California and we put them to work.

In addition to the Flood series Michael sent a series he calls JUMP! which are images taken of his son and his friends jumping off a pier right down the street from his house.  The project has become a very significant body of work and involved michael shooting in the air, in a boat, underwater, and in extreme gyrations on the pier.

Another series was his collage series where he digitally seamed a series of vertical panorama shots.

Just as we about had the layout set Michael calls and says he has another series called "Things I Found on the Beach-Gloves Edition" Turns out he is an inveterate beach comber.  We expanded into the adjacent gallery and hung three of this series.  I found out later that ALL of these gloves were found in a single day.

For a previous exhibition I had painted a dark square on the gallery wall to put text on and it had taken me about 10 coats of paint to completely eliminate all traces of it.  I vowed to never do it again.  I had just seen a show at the Getty Center in LA where they had used large vertical text blocks to designate the various series in the show and I hit upon the idea of using reversed out vinyl letters to give graphic punch without having to paint the walls.  I ordered it from our vinyl supplier and Ellen, aka Vinyl Girl, did a beautiful job of installing them.  As usual the joke ended up being on me.  When I took down the show the vinyl took off not only the paint but so much of the drywall that I had to replace some of it.  Another time saver...........but it sure did look great.

  The opening on Saturday NIght was a smash.

And the artist talk was fascinating. The work always becomes much richer after you know more about the artist's process and history.

In an unbelievable small world story, Michael asked me if he could invite a childhood friend of his from Asheville to the opening weekend and when he told me his name it sounded familiar. In 1998 when my company KONTEK decided we needed our first website I used Michael Prince's website as my model as I had been following his work and really liked his site.  I contacted the guy listed on the site as the designer and asked him if he would design ours.  He agreed and he did a fantastic job but we never met.  We did everything remotely. It turns out it was Michael's friend and so 15 years later I got to meet my web designer although he is now a philosphy professor!  Chris (left) and Malea came for the weekend and we have become fast friends.

Michael it was five days that we will not soon forget.  Thanks for a wild and fun ride.

 

 

MDCCCXXXIX

Yea my Roman numerals were a little rusty too.  It's 1839, a sort of composite year for the birth of photography--three pioneers, William Henry Fox Talbot, Nicéphore Niépce, and Louis Daguerre, all working simultaneously but independantly to "fix an image" using different methodologies. This was the timeline:

1826  Nicéphore Niépce makes the earliest known extant photograph of the view from his studio window at Le Gras, his estate in Chalon-sur-Saône, France

1835  William Henry Fox Talbot makes the first surviving photographic negative of a latticed window at Lacock Abbey, his estate in southern England.

1837-1838  Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre makes first successful photographs including a view from his window in Paris of the Boulevard du Temple, which is believed to be the first photograph of a human being.

1839  Daguerre reveals his process to the French Government and the discovery of a method to fix images was publically announced for the first time in the Gazette de France.

 

MDCCCXXXIX was the title of Lisa McCarty's MFA thesis exhibition in the Duke MFAEDA program and shown here at Cassilhaus. Lisa is a pioneer herself. She was in the inaugural class of Duke's new Masters in Experimental and Documentary Arts. She was the first to propose mounting her thesis show outside of the Duke campus and defended her thesis before her whole committee right here in the gallery. Her practice includes making pilgrimages to the birthplaces of photography and indeed included trips to the homes and studios of the three pioneers mentioned above in England and France where she shot extensively and tried to reconnect to those formative photographic experiences. She talks more about the project:

 

MDCCCXXXIX  (1839) is a narrative of how photography came about, and how it continues to evolve. In Latent Image: The Discovery of Photography, curator and historian Beaumont Newhall states, “Photography has no single inventor. At the same time, distantly removed from one another, experimenters were working on the same problem unaware of each others work until, in January of 1839, an announcement was made in Paris by the Academie des Sciences of the success of one of them.”

Though the 1839 announcement publicly illuminated the discovery of the method to fix images, experiments to this end have been documented as early as 1802 and have never ceased. Consequently, 1839 is both a fixed date and an idea. It signifies the moment photography was born, though this is a moment that repeats with every generation of imagemakers. With the emergence of every new method for fixing images the medium is reborn, persisting much like a phoenix, cyclically regenerating from its own ashes. Therefore, one could say it is the project of every photographer to reinvent the medium whether by technical, formal, and/or conceptual means.

MDCCCXXXIX is an account of one such project. My particular experiments have involved pilgrimages to document sites where Fox Talbot, Daguerre, and Niépce worked, reading and generating facsimiles of their instructions for building cameras and fixing images, and finally the creation and systematic testing of my own cameras. Through this process I have discovered photography yet again, and have the pleasure of rediscovering it each and every time I make an image.

And so, still distantly removed from one another across geographic and temporal expanses, the cycle endures. Experimenters are still working on the same problem and MDCCCXXXIX continues to unfold.

 

Lisa celebrating with thesis committee members  Alex Harris, Jeff Whetstone, and David Gatten

Her secret committee mind control weapon revealed

 

The bulk of the images in the show were taken with self-made pinhole cameras of her own design. Common to each design was a 4"x5" film holder.

Startlingly unique and beautiful images.  Most are long exposures where chance and experimentation play a huge role.  Lisa trys to put herself in the shoes of the early pioneers who were in uncharted territory and developing their process as they made images.

 

Lisa constructed a scale model of the entire gallery with to-scale images to work out all of the placements and juxtapositions in advance.

Her invitation image was this striking dual aperture image of a hurricane lamp.  She is still not exactly sure what happened during the exposure put posits that a piece of gaffer tape inside the camera came loose  and covered part of the film plane.  The intensity of the filament in the lamp was still strong enough to be seen through the tape.

My favorite piece in the show was 9:00-9:03 (lace) in which she wrapped one of her cameras in lace and pointed it toward the sky.  We have added this piece to our collection.

This exhibition was in addition to a formidable written thesis which hopefully will be turned into a book.  We are honored to have hosted Lisa's exhibition here and incredibly proud of the work she did to earn her MFA.  Thanks Lisa!