Cassilhaus

Mark Sloan and Curator Camp

I've spoken before in this space about wanting to keep the multi in our multidisciplinary artist residency. In addition to the many visual artists we have hosted we have invited a poet, choreographer, theatrical director, writer, and now a curator.  Mark Sloan is a fantastic visual artist, prolific author, and skilled arts administrator but his super power is curating.  For the past 20 years he has been the senior curator and director at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC. He has curated hundreds of exhibitions, many of which have toured nationally and internationally. He has often dramatically advanced the profile and careers of emerging and mid-career artists through his spectacular exhibitions and publications. Mark was responsible for our discovery of one of our earlier Cassilhaus fellows Aldwyth. The post tells the whole wonderful story.

I've known Mark for a long time and we really wanted him to come for the residency.  It took a bit of cajoling to get him to carve out the space in his densely packed schedule to come but once he did it seemed like it was meant to be. He grew up in this area so he didn't need any orientation but it also meant lots of friends and family that had designs on his time here. We tried to provide a "cone of silence" so he could actually retreat into the woods here.

I remembered Mark mentioning a curators gathering he organized a few years ago called the Kudzu Summit where he brought top contemporary curators from across the Southeast together for a multi-day workshop.  I asked him if we could organize a smaller version of that at Cassilhaus and he was very enthusiastic. I decided to dub it Cassilhaus Contemporary Curator's Camp. :) We had 16 curators come from North and South Carolina and Virginia (one via Skype) for a full day workshop and exchange. Despite the jokes about archery, lanyards, and camp songs, it was an unqualified success and a rare opportunity for these folks to have collaborative exchange and work through questions or issues about upcoming exhibitions.

Mark asked each participant to talk about their work and upcoming projects.

One of the participants in curator camp was Dr. Mark Long, a political geographer and curator from the College of Charleston who has been one of Mark Sloan's long time collaborators.  They are currently working on an exhibition (likely Fall of 2016) called Southbound about southern photography. They took advantage of their time here to do studio visits and develop a comprehensive artist list for consideration for the show.

The day after curator camp Mark took me and Laura Ritchie, the Director of the Carrack in Durham and another of the curator campers, to visit famous NC outsider artist Clyde Jones. Clyde is well known for his chain saw critters and for refusing to sell his art to anyone.  He will only give it away.

 

Mark also gave a talk at Cassilhaus about how he does his work from organizing exhibitions to details on producing publications. The room was thick with photographers. It was almost exhausting to hear the breadth and depth of his efforts sometimes across multiple continents and multiple years to pull together his singular exhibitions. Despite often being faced with limited resources, everything he produces is at a world class level.

 

It was an incredible joy to have Mark spend time with us.  He has much to teach, has infectious energy and enthusiasm, and is an all around spectacular human being. Thanks Mark for sharing your gifts.

 

Heaven is satisfied curiosity. --Paola Antonelli

 

 

ADF Dance Party 2014 | Ballet Preljocaj

This is year six in a row for us hosting an after performance dinner/party for one of the American Dance Festival companies and it is always sort of surreal attending a performance and being mesmerized by almost super human dancers and then an hour later having them walk into your living room! This year we hosted with our good friend Susan Moffat. We try to choose companies we have not seen before and this was the case with French company Ballet Preljocaj. I had screwed up my calendar resulting in some serious overscheduling.  We had 16 curators (see next post) for an all day conference at the house and we had to leave directly from there to see the performance and then race back to prepare dinner for the company. The party went late of course but what a rich and full day of art and spectacular movement!

the dancers

Ellen with company founder Angelin Prellocaj

ADF ED Jodee Nimerichter with Ariane Reinhart

Close to 1 a.m. I was channeling my inner Gregory Crewdson with this photograph.

 

 

Cassilhaus AIR 5 Year Reunion

Since May of 2009 when we started the artist residency we have had 18 visiting artists at Cassilhaus and we thought it was time for a reunion party! 7 artists were able to make it back and none of them knew one another so it was a great opportunity for exchange and networking.  Tamas and Eszter (see previous post) were here during the June reunion so they got to join in the fun as the newest residents. We have made such beautiful connections with our artists over the years and we miss them so much that it was exponentially joyous to have a bunch of them here together.

To add to the party we placed the returning artists with host families from the extended Cassilhaus family and they were invited to several of the reunion events. Our neighbor Kitty hosted Walter from Switzerland and they have become fast friends.

I went a little crazy on the programming for the 4 day weekend.  I pulled in a bunch of favors and really pulled out the stops to have an extraordinary experience for our visitors.  We started on Thursday with a fascinating tour of the Ackland Museum paper conservation lab. Many of our artists do works on paper and were amazed at the magic conservator Lyn Koehnline was able to do with damaged works in their collection. We followed with a brief visit to Light Art + Design Gallery and the Horace Williams House in Chapel Hill to see two exhibitions. I rented a big passenger van so we were all able to travel together.  We headed back to Cassilhaus where Ippy Patterson (see earlier post) gave us a full tour of her show in the gallery.  Dinner was a very very special treat.  Our friend and amazing chef/restarateur Giorgios Bakatsias gave us the amazing gift of making a special 7 course farm to fork dinner for all of us.

Mark could only be with us one night due to his heavy ADF teaching schedule but he sure picked the right night!

Giorgios you are the best! Ellen played sous chef.

After dinner we had another special treat with noted author Allan Gurganus giving us a wonderful reading from one of his short stories. It was a night we will not forget.

On Friday morning we headed down to Durham's own Organic Transit to get a test drive of the 3 wheeled hybrid bike called the ELF. They gave us a great tour of their manufacturing operation. Doug plays Vanna.

 

 

After a visit to Durham institution The Scrap Exchange and Liberty Arts  (I thought we were going to need to do an intervention to get Rachel out of the Scrap Exchange), we headed to the Charlotte Brody Discovery Garden inside the main Duke Gardens for a picnic and walk.  Ellen's architecture firm designed the buildings, trellis, and entry pavillion.

Doug was channeling his inner gardener.

 

The gardens are right next door to the Nasher Museum of Art and our friend and chief curator at the Nasher Trevor Schoonmaker gave us a private tour of the Sound Vision exhibition which he curated. The exhibition was comprised of new acquisitions since the opening of the Nasher. He had lots of great questions from his artist audience!

It was a short walk over to Duke Chapel and one of the most special treats of our entire weekend.  I have know University Carillonneur Sam Hammond since my undergraduate days at Duke in the late seventies.  Every weekday at 5pm Sam ascends the elevator to the top of the chapel tower to serenade the Duke community on the bells.  It is closed to the public but as a favor he allowed our group to join him on high and it was a magical treat.

 

The view from the Carillon balcony

In the evening we were joinded by the host families and we all headed back to Cassilhaus for a Pecha Kucha style event where everyone made a presentation about the current work they were doing. Fascinating stuff all around.

Saturday was a quieter day for folks to do more on their own.  We did have group meals and then had a wonderful evening of an American Dance Festival peformance by Ballet Hispanico.  We are so grateful to our friend Jodee Nimerichter, the Executive Director of ADF,  who treated us to the performance and greeted us afterwards.

Sunday morning Ann led us in some movement and meditation to get the day off to a great start.

We then all headed off to the singular Duke Lemur Center to see some of the most amazing creatures on the planet.  How cool that the largest population of these creatures ourside of their native Madagascar is right here in Durham!

Rachel and Ellen were scheming new and considerably more expansive enclosure designs.

Making sure to cover all the cities in the Triangle we headed off to Raleigh for a picnic in the NC Museum of Art Outdoor Art Park and then got a private tour of the Bull City Summer Exhibition by participating photographer Leah Sobsey.  Sunday evening with the blessing of the host we crashed a private party at CAM Raleigh and saw a spectacular exhibition by Gabriel Dawe and the second half of the Bull City Summer Exhibition.

We were so sad to see Monday come.  We said goodbye at breakfast at our dear friend Jennings Brody's restaurant Parker and Otis in Durham.  There was already much talk of the 10 year reunion.  See you in 2019! (That's Aldwyth hiding behind the Pimento cheese sandwich.)

 

“I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.”  --Marcel Duchamp

Tamas Dezso and Eszter Szablyar

Never let it be said that a single image can't change lives. I discovered this photograph by Hungarian photographer Tamas Dezso in April of 2012 at an AIPAD fair in NY and it knocked me accross the room.  It was taken in an abandoned Soviet military base in Hungary. I couldn't take my eyes off of it and included it in a few shows I put together.  It was always the piece that got the most attention and spawned the most questions.  I started to look more deeply into his work and loved what I saw and decided I wanted to meet Tamas.

It's a bit of a leap of faith to invite a total stranger to stay in your home for a month but I had a very good gut feeling and in March 2013 we invited Tamas to the residency for June of 2014. The response was immediate.  He said he had been working on a book about Romania for several years with his partner Eszter Szablyar, a writer, and they had just been talking about finding a place to retreat to the following summer to do final sequencing and finish the book. It was meant to be and we got two artists for the price of one!

We fell in love with them immediately. It was a wonderful connection and fascinating to see their process and their new work that we hadn't seen before. Some new favorites:

 

They asked us to help with the book sequencing which exposed us to the entire project.

Tamas has had quite a bit of international press on his work and he also has received numerous awards including a Daylight/CDS Award and show in Durham so he has a following in the area.  We were shocked by how much demand there was for his and Eszter's artist talk.  We had to remove the dining table and light fixture to get 55 people in our living room.

They set the tone for the talk in an interesting way.  As people were coming into the talk they distributed 25 short but grim texts at random explaining conditions during the Nicolae Ceausescu dictatorship and had them read sequentially aloud.  It was sobering and very effective.

We are hopeful the book will be out in Spring 2015 and we can go to Budapest to celebrate.  Tamas and Eszter we miss you.

Ippy Patterson/Lifelines

I'd known Ippy Patterson for a while and had admired her intricate pen and ink work. We have one of her Electricy of Plants Series pieces in our collection.  I also adored her but it never really occurred to me that I might show her work here at Cassilhaus.  I seem to have this obsession with photography:) One day a year or so ago I got the photograph below in the signature of one of her emails.

I loved it and told her I didn't know she did photography.  She told me she didn't really and that she had taken this with her cell phone.  I asked if I could see more of her photos the next time we got together and she was pretty dismissive of the idea. But pretty regularly I started to get little cell phone image missives in my inbox and if I liked them I would reply for her to "put it on the pile."

Pretty soon I wanted to see "the pile" in person and Ellen and I scheduled a studio visit at Ippy's place. Bodies of work just kept coming out of boxes and we loved every one of them and there was an amazing range.  She was even working on a video piece for the first time. I told her that we wanted to do a big career retrospective show but would do it if and only if she agreed to exhibit her photographs for the first time.

Ignorance really is a huge advantage when taking on big projects and I'd definitely never done anything this ambitious. Fortunately our intern Rachel and Ippy and her husband Neil were with me every step of the way. The show turned out to have 93 pieces across 8 media throughout the entire house! But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

We started in December of last year to select and sequence the photographs. We spent a good bit of time talking about scale, framing, pairings etc. and after quite a few iterations we settled on 13 images and found some interesting dialog between the pieces.

One of my favorites is a self portrait called Maj-jong Self Portrait.

Ellen and I had been to Ippy and Neil's for dinner a few times over the years and we loved this amazing large abstract drawing she had done directly on her dining room wall. She called it a hair drawing.

I asked her if she would do one on the main wall going into the gallery and she was totally game.  She showed up in early May with a drop cloth, a boom box, and a box of art supplies and made a magical installation which set the bar for the entire exhibition.

 

 

Another body of work that Ippy had not exhibited before was her ongoing series called the Boogeyman Memoirs.  It is (as of this writing) a series of 28 mostly dark and forboding rememberances of her childhood growing up in the Atacama Desert in Chile-a very stark contrast to her luscious botanical drawings and other work. She plans ultimately to pair these technically brilliant drawings with narrative text for a memoir.

The installation of this series nearly killed me. They were unframed and we have an alcove in our entry gallery that was perfectly sized for a dense grid of 4 rows of seven drawings.  After some higher math-

I decided I would sandwich two pieces of archival foamcore 1" shy all around of the drawing dimension and "float" the drawing by attaching the rear most foam core piece to the wall. I knew I couldn't use traditional picture hooks or nails as I would never get the precision I needed in the very tight grid.  To add insult to injury the drawings were not all exactly the same size. I knew I needed to use some kind of archival and removable adhesive-maybe two different types-to attach the foamcore to the wall and the drawing to the foamcore. I also knew I would drive myself insane if I did not use some sort of laser leveling device to stay accurately on the grid.  I called my friend Brad at the Nasher Museum and borrowed his laser. OMG you can never go back!! I drank the Kool-aid immediately and went out and bought myself the same model. Ellen, aka Vinyl girl, magically transformed into Laser Girl and was a huge help.

We got the TidyCat option for the final row.

I called a bunch of folks I thought might have experience with archival adhesives and got a bunch of different recommendations. I had this grid of 28 plus another grid of 15 drawings to do in the upstairs gallery.  Doing Japanese hinges with archival paste was just too labor intensive. I did sort of a hail Mary buy on Amazon to experiment with different options:

I tried velcro, glue dots, scrapbooking tape, sticky putty, and various 3M picture hanging products.  Just when I thought I had the perfect solution we would hear the dreaded plop in the middle of the night of a drawing falling off the wall and I'd have to look for another option.  The wall is painted with a special super flat zero VOC paint and apparently it is formulated so NOTHING will stick to it.  The bond between the drawing and the foam core was holding pretty well but the interface between the foam core and the wall was the failure point. Fortunately this was also the interface where I didn't have archival concerns.  I tried heavy tapes including gaffer tape and they all eventually failed. Just when I was about the throw in the towel I remembered this product I had found to keep pictures from tilting on the wall that I had used years ago-basically like a push pin but with no head-just an flat adhesive plate.  I finally tracked them down and attached them to the back of the foam core, held the drawings in place, and then forced the spikes into the drywall.  I was very proud of myself until the barrier between the plastic plate and the double stick tape on these things started to fail leaving the pins in the wall and the drawing on the floor!  I then figured out a way to put gaffer tape over the entire assembly with the spike sticking through and that ultimately proved to be the thing that worked.  Whew.

All of the frustration melted away in the chance to work everyday with Ippy and Neil. They assisted with every aspect of the installation including the lighting.

Preparing the large "blow-up" botanical banners for hanging.

Installing "Escape from Eden"-an almost inhumanly detailed series of connected drawings that took over a year to complete and are installed in a beautiful custom wood case.

 

The show ended up looking just spectacular.  Ippy was elated and I am as proud of it as any show I have done at Cassilhaus.(following five installation photos by Roger Haile)

We settled on the title Lifelines for the exhibition.  In addition to the many hyperdetailed drawings we included a series of very loose charcoal life drawings and the title just seem to encompass all of the work so well.

I am at risk of making the longest blog post ever but there is so much to cover.  I will close with images from the opening in May and Ippy's amazing artist talk in June.

 Thank you Ippy!

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world.  Over the years he fills a given surface with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, horses, and people.  Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.

 

                                                                                                                        Jorge Luis Borges

 

POST SCRIPT

I'm setting some sort of infamous milestone by being 10 blog posts behind.  I need to stop programming and start writing. To make up for it I am offering homemade gluten free oatmeal raisin zipcode cookies! Looks like someone got to the "R" before I got to my camera.

You've heard me rave before in this space about our wonderful Cassilhaus intern Rachel Boillot from the Duke MFAEDA program. She's all graduated now but back in March she had her MFA thesis show here in the gallery. Her project, called Post Scipt, explored in beautiful and sobering depth the plight of small rural communities in the South that are losing their zip codes and by extension their community identities.

It was a joy for me to get to spend so much time with Rachel and her work while the show was being developed over the months leading up to the opening. Her editing and curating process helped me to see the work and know the story so much more fully.

The show was a knockout.  Not only were the prints beautiful but we mocked up a period post office lobby in the library of the gallery with old furniture and vintage post office boxes.  Rachel's muse for the project was Eudora Welty, in particular her story "Why I live at the Post Office." She decided to mount quotations from her letters inside backlit vintage PO boxes to add depth to the story. I was feeling old when I had to explain to Rachel what carbon paper was :). She then used an ancient manual typewriter with carbon paper to type the text of the letters for the boxes.

 

The opening party was packed and filled with her classmates, family, thesis committee, and Cassilhaus regulars.

 

After studying photobook design with Alex and Rachel Norris Webb, Rachel produced a beautiful limited edition book of 100 copies which has nearly sold out.

Prints sold well at the opening as well. Rachel hit it out of the park and we were immensely proud to be at the game.  She is off now in rural Tennessee for the summer shooting photos of the old time music community-another vanishing piece of our cultural landscape. This will not be the last we will hear from Rachel Boillot.