Cassilhaus: SABBATICAL WEEK SEVENTEEN

I've been buried in trip planning for days. When I embark on a major new leg of the sabbatical I have a list of places I might want to visit and do additional research on. I begin to write letters of introduction in advance without knowing exactly when I will be in their area. It's a house of cards and at some point you just need to decide where you will be and hope for the best. Once things start to firm up I put on my travel agent hat and make flights, car rentals, airbnb selections etc. Driving such great distances is getting a little old and so as I was driving to LA from Phoenix I decide to use a sort of hub and spoke strategy for my visits to the West. My wonderful friends Kevin and Betsy Dill offered me their guest house in West Hollywood for as long as I want so I am making camp there and I am going to be flying to various destinations as needed. First I wanted to spend a few days with their family and check out a few things in LA. I had heard a lot of buzz about the Maholy-Nagy retrospective show at LACMA and I went with Betsy. I knew his photo work but had no idea of the range of other work he did.

I think this photograph was my favorite piece in the show. What an amazing composition. Sorry for the crappy iPhone reproduction. Below Betsy through the exhibition entry door.

I always love to visit my favorite Chris Burdens when I am at LACMA. A reminder that if you are getting this post via email you will likely not be able to view the videos. Go directly to the blog here. Bellow is a short film about Burden's Metropolis II.

I had a little fun with his signature piece Urban Light 2008 at the entrance to the museum.

A new discovery for me this visit was the work of Saudi Arabian artist Abdulnasser Gharem, a self-taught artist who spent 23 years in the Saudi military. This politically charged piece is called Camouflage 2017 and is made of rubber stamps. The detail below shows the reversed text which appears throughout the work.

I couldn't resist the obligatory "levitating" shot of Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass (photo by Betsy). If you haven't seen Doug Pray's documentary about the project of getting this 340 ton boulder to LACMA it is worth a view.

Betsy and I also squeezed in a visit to the Getty to see Chris Killip's show.

This was my favorite from the Killip show-Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside 1976

I decided that my next segment would be Washington, Oregon, and San Francisco. I flew to Portland and drove all the way north to Port Townsend, WA. I was originally supposed to see a residency program there but the appointment fell through and I ended up doing two great studio visits with Seth Rolland and Andrea Love. Seth is an amazing furniture designer and builder that I met when we purchased one of his tables for Cassilhaus. This is my second studio visit with him and he showed me some of his latest creations.

My friend Andrea is an incredible animator that I met through her parents who are dear friends from Durham. She does not do computer 2D animation but very labor intensive 3D frame by frame animation from sets and characters that she makes herself. Here is her demo real to give you a flavor of her work. This old school low tech methodology gives the work an unusually fresh and unique look. She gave me a studio tour to get a glimpse of how the "sausage is made." Click on any image in this post to enlarge.

Andrea with husband Alex

We all went back to Seth's shop afterwards and then had a nice dinner on the water. Of course everybody knows everybody already in Port Townsend.

I found a crazy and wonderful airbnb in PT with a spectacular cat. A hand-built straw bale house that was sort of Middle Earth meets the Moors. The hosts make müsli commercially and sell it at local farmers' markets and online.

I was driving down some random road in PT and out of the corner of my eye I saw this intense splash of color flapping in the wind on a clothesline and I almost drove off the road trying to get my camera out. I was praying the home owner would not come out to find out what the crazy man was doing photographing her sheets.