Cassilhaus

Eva Weber

We've made significant efforts in the past few years to extend our reach into the arts community here in the Triangle by forming partnerships with other arts organizations.  About two years ago we reached out to the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival based in Durham to see if they were interested in collaborating by bringing a filmmaker to the Cassilhaus Residency during the 2015 Festival. Our residency is invitation only so we have never had an application process but Full Frame suggested we send a short application out to all of the filmmakers that had had films accepted to the festival in the past 3 years. After reviewing applications with the folks at the festival we selected London based Eva Weber who had screened at Full Frame multiple times in the past. Eva is on the left here with Alexa Dillworth of CDS.

Eva was in the early stages of working on a project about Chinese "Ghost Brides" (pretty creepy stuff!) and we were able to connect her with several scholars at Duke who had research interests in common.

She did a wonderful community screening of three of her past films at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies (CDS):  City of Cranes, The Intimacy of Strangers, and Reindeer. There was a lively Q&A afterwards.

We tried to distract her from her work the best we could.

We took her out to celebrate her birthday at Durham's new 21C Hotel with its 24/7 art museum.

It was so fun to have her here with us during the film festival.  We had a zillion questions and learned much about the inner workings of the documentary film world. Fingers crossed that she gets another film into Full Frame so we can get her back here again next year!

 

THEY THEM

It is always nice to have a new set of eyes to curate an exhibition from a collection that you are very close to.  It has been fun and illuminating to have our interns curate shows from our own collection and we asked Eric Pickersgill last year if he would put something together.

He put together a beautiful show called THEY THEM which drew from images in our collection that had two or more figures and was concerned with the dialog between those subjects as well as the dialog with the photographer.  When I asked about the name he said that when he spoke about the pieces he was always saying "they" or "them" when describing the images. Seeing our favorite images "playing with others" always makes for new discoveries and deeper appreciation of the work.  You can see the full checklist here: Download They_them_image_list

 

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.   --Anais Nin

 

Art on Every Wall

I can't imagine living without art surrounding me every day and I know personally the power it has to uplift and inspire.  A few years ago I bought a stunning and beautifully printed calendar by famed British photographer Michael Kenna and it was so beautiful that I couldn't bring myself to throw it away at the end of the year. 2015 is the 19th year of his publishing this calendar which is produced in Japan and the images look almost like original prints.

So I decided that I would cut up the calendar and frame each of the images and donate them to local non profits. The frames were donated by the family of Julian T. Baker Jr., a passionate Raleigh photography collector, after he passed away in 2011. Cassilhaus donated the first set to Genesis Home and then the Durham Literacy Center.  I started working with the interns here to make it part of the framing training we do and then it gave us an opportunity to involve them in learning about local non profits when we deliver the prints. Last year we donated to Threshold and this year we donated five framed pictures each to Compass Center and Durham Crisis Response Center. Both are doing amazing work in domestic violence prevention and  sexual assault victim support and care. 

Please consider supporting these organizations that work in our community and send me suggestions and recommendations for other organizations in Durham and Chapel Hill that would benefit from photography in their facilities. I just ordered the 2014 and 2015 calendars so we are ready to frame!

 

 

Faraway Nearby

Last October during the Click! Triangle Photography Festival I hit on the idea of doing a joint Duke/UNC MFA photography faculty show-something that had never been done before.  Both programs have tremendous artists and I thought it would be a great way to increase collaboration between the two programs and get the students and faculty talking more to each other.  I approached Lisa McCarty and Huston Paschal about curating the show and they enthusiastically agreed and started their studio visits. 

The curators decided to select three artists from each institution: Alex Harris, William Noland, and Tom Rankin from Duke, and  elin o’Hara slavick, Hồng-Ân Trương, and Jeff Whetstone from UNC. They selected 3 pieces from each artist and the checklist is here: Download Faraway Nearby Final Checklist.

 

 

I got to tag along on most of the studio visits and much of the work was completely new to me.  A good deal of the work was recent but the curators took a broad look at the careers of these artists and found some early gems from the 80s and 90s.

One of the wonderful things Lisa and Huston did was sandwich the large main show between a small show of the work of John Menapace in our project gallery and a tiny show in the West Gallery of the 3 former and current Cassilhaus interns-Lisa McCarty, Rachel Boillot, and Eric Pickersgill-who are all former or current students from the two MFA programs. This set up a sort of 3 generation exhibition.  Menapace is considered by many to be the father of fine art photography in this region of NC.  He was very influential in bringing overdue recognition to the medium and did much to set up the photo programs at Duke and UNC.  He was an inspiration to several of the 6 faculty participants and they in term were mentors and guides to the new generation of MFA students.

 There was one piece from each of the interns.

The opening was a smash as usual and I think it was the first time we had all three interns at Cassilhaus at the same time.

We had another first with this exhibition-a joint student MFA mixer.  Sorry I forgot to take pictures!  It was a little bit of sweet revenge as the students got to do reverse crits on their professors.