Cassilhaus

SABBATICAL WEEK FIVE

Camille Utterback & Romy Achituv  Text Rain, 1999  Video Installation at 21c Museum Hotel Louisville

 

Week five started off with a small blip in my otherwise stellar travel karma. On my drive from Nashville to Louisville, KY I hit the remains of a pallet on the interstate and to make a long story short I am now the proud owner of four new tires on my car and am $900 lighter. I invoked my father's sage advice of not worrying about anything that can be fixed with money and counted my blessings that I was not upside down in a ditch on the side of the road.

It was a big traveling week with lots of ground to cover on my way to an important appointment in Cleveland mid-week. The redirect of my trip from Texas and points south means lots more winter. I finally feel like I have found my rhythm and my confidence and I have been able to stay in the present for the first time in a very long time. In this nice groove I have struck a balance between attending to the outside world and focusing on and executing the work I want to do on this sabbatical. I am for the most part no longer unmoored by Trump's daily attempt to lower the bar on human discourse and destroy the free world. I am constantly surrounded by generous, welcoming, engaged, loving, creative, and vibrant humans and it is a welcome and necessary salve.

 

First stop this week was Louisville, KY-my first time there and I was not disappointed. I surprised even myself by going to the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory Tour. I have no interest in baseball but I love me a good "how they make stuff" tour. Watching them turn those raw cylinders of wood into a beautiful sculpted bat in just seconds is amazing. Who knew there was a need for anybody to make 1.8 million bats a year and then find out that they are one of about 30 companies making them!  Who knew that EVERY MLB player has a proprietary formula for THEIR bat and each one is made to spec on a CNC cutter with amazing accuracy and each player goes through on average 175 bats each per year. In the sexism is alive and well department, I was astonished to find this enormous 4 sided display in the gift shop of personalized bat pens for the kids without A SINGLE GIRLS NAME ON THE RACK.

 

I got to see the original 21c Museum Hotel (the 5th one is in Durham) and its fantastic exhibition The Future is Female.

South African artist Nandipha Mntambo. Umfanekiso wesibuko (Mirror Image), 2013  Cowhide and Resin  The pieces are molded from the artist's own body.

 

South African Sanell Aggenback. Rumours, 2011 Mixed Media

American artist Kathleen McQuade Olliges.  Supply and Demand, 2014.  Latex nipples, silicone nipples, silicone adhesive, mannequin.

 

I headed on to Cincinnati where I stayed at an incredible airbnb right beside the stunning Eden Park area of the city. I had the entire four bedroom 3rd floor to myself for the grand fee of $75/night.The couple had lovingly restored the late 1800s home with their own hands over 7 years--an enormous grand mansion designed by the architect that did the major government buildings in Cincinnati. I stayed in the room with the balcony on the right. They have just finished and i think I was their second or third tenant. They could not have been more delightful hosts.

They found this room when they tore out the drop ceiling and drywall walls!

I woke up at about 2:30 in the morning to amazing light patterns all over the walls.  I grabbed my camera and spent the next hour photographing.

Cincinnati was an eye opener for me.  I had no idea it was so huge and so hilly and so beautiful. It also had a 21c Museum Hotel right near the Zaha Hadid designed Contemporary Art Museum.

Tim Hetherington (English/American)  Luke Nevalla, Korengal Vallery, Afghanistan, 2008  Digital Chromogenic Print  21c Museum Hotel

Frank has fun with mirrors at the Contemporary Art Museum

Casey Riordan Millard (American) Shark Girl at the Bus Stop

 

I had heard about Fred and Laura Bidwell and the work they were doing in Cleveland and was introduced to them briefly at an AIPAD fair by Tom Gitterman. Early on in my trip planning I decided I really wanted to make an effort to spend significant time in Cleveland as I felt like I could learn a lot from them.  They are serious photo collectors and support emerging photographers and the arts community in Cleveland in extraordinary and unprecedented ways. Their work is also having spectacular success on the economic development front in struggling communities in the city with major investment going on in the communities they initiate projects in. Fred was incredibly generous with his time and I was able to talk at length during two extensive meetings about issues of legacy, community impact, collecting, and a range of other issues.  The budget and scale of his projects are much larger than ours but many of the same principals apply. Through Bidwell Projects they converted and developed a former electrical power facility into Transformer Station which is an extraordinary museum showcasing emerging photo and photo based artists. He also shared plans for the amazing and world class FRONT Triennial they are planning for Cleveland in 2018.

 

Transformer Station

They share programming responsibility with the Cleveland Art Museum where Fred once served as director.

Speaking of the Cleveland Museum--it is a stunner!  The most recent addition was designed by Rafael Viñoly, the same architect that designed the Nasher Museum at Duke.

 

Pardon the horrible pun but his piece is off the Richter Scale!  Details below of the colors in this 1991 Gerhard Richter abstract painting.

I was pleasantly surprised to find this photo exhibition of the work of Louis Draper and Leonard Freed.

Louis Draper (American) Girl and Cuba, Philadephia, 1968.  Gelatin Silver Print

Leonard Freed (American) Playing football in a black neighborhood outside Washington, DC, 1964  Gelatin Silver Print

 

Anish Kapoor (Indian)  C-Curve, 2007  Stainless Steel

 

Cleveland is, of course, the home of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Coming out of the Cleveland Museum I stumbled upon this Frank Gehry Building at Case Western Reserve University.

The down side of things clicking along like a well oiled machine is that my planning time line was getting shorter and shorter.  I had started out fully planned two weeks out and by the time I got to Cleveland I was about 2 days out.  I had worked out some great connections in Pittsburgh but all three of them fell through and I found myself for the first time in a place where I didn't know where I was going to lay my head down that evening. I scrambled and sent some letters to prospects I had identified in NY state and thought I might head in the direction of Syracuse.  I looked at a map to find a place midway between Cleveland and Syracuse and I decided to go to Buffalo. I am traveling with a full US Lonely Planet travel guide and Ellen gave me a giant volume of all of the NY Times "36 Hours in...." and I found out there are some major architectural landmarks in Buffalo.  Before I married an architect and got involved with George Smart's amazing NC Modernist Houses, architecture was not much on my radar. Now I seek it out wherever I go. One of Frank Lloyd Wright's seminal early works is the Darwin Martin House Complex. It is a sprawling complex with 4 structures. The house was completely abandoned for nearly two decades and they are just completing a 50 million dollar!!! restoration.

 

 

A while back at a film fesitval I saw a documentary about the architect Louis Sullivan and it featured this amazing early sky scraper in Buffalo called the Guaranty Building.  With an exterior of terra cotta tile and an opulent interior it is magnificent to see up close.

 

A great way to end the week.  Thanks for following along.  Check out more pictures from my adventure here.

 

 

Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.

--Frank Zappa

 

SABBATICAL WEEK FOUR

As always if you are receiving this via email please go directly to the blog site here for better formatting. You can click on any image to enlarge.

 

Mardi Gras parade on the Oxford, MS Square

Week 4 was mercifully a little slower paced. My good friend Lynn at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke connected me with a wonderful couple in Oxford, MS, Ron and Joe, who graciously put up this stranger in their stunning guest house, hilariously dubbed Ditch Crest. Ditch Crest is right out of a Faulkner novel which is appropriate as Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak, is in town. Ron is the regional director of Teach for America and I learned a lot about this amazing organization. I was also able to catch up on a lot of non sabbatical related business and get to know the small town of Oxford.

The "kitten altar" in my bedroom at Ditch Crest

I had a wonderful visit to Rowan Oak and a walk through the adjacent Bailey Woods.

I had the best biscuit of my life at Big Bad Breakfast.

My big day trip adventure was to the blues capital of the universe, Clarksdale, MS. I think they have live music 365 days a year. For a guy who a) tries to get to bed by 10 pm every night b) doesn't much ever go see live music and c) can count on two hands the number of bars/clubs he has visited in his lifetime, a night out visiting THREE Blues Clubs was a celebration of being outside my comfort zone! My first stop was the Juke Joint Chapel at the Shack Up Inn.

I moved on to the Ground Zero Blues Club which is co-owned by actor and Mississippi native Morgan Freeman. The fried catfish was amazing and the mac and cheese world class.  Every surface in the entire place is covered with Sharpie graffiti.  Amazingly friendly folks, smoke free, and awesome music.

This is the local harmonica sales and repair store owner around the corner.  He offers Open Harp Surgery.

I finished off the night at Red's Blues Lounge which if you don't know where it is you definitely won't find it. Frank goes clubbing!!!

 

One of my most exciting finds on the trip so far directed me to an unplanned visit to Memphis-Crosstown Arts and the Crosstown Concourse Project. There are not enough superlatives to describe the team at Crosstown and this amazing $180 million community development project with funding from 30 different sources. Do yourself a favor and follow these links and learn about these projects.  I have never seen such a case where the arts tail was TOTALLY wagging the development dog. I felt like I was in some crazy parallel universe where all decisions were being made based on how well the outcome would support the arts community! My incredibly gracious hosts, Amanda "Sparks" Sparks and her husband Chris Miner, treated me like long lost friends after learning of my existence less than 48 hours before and gave me the super grand tour of all of Crosstown's projects and the entire Concourse renovation.  They will have apartments AND studios in the building for 12-16 simultaneous visiting artists and over 20 programmable arts spaces in the building! They and a small team are running the whole project and really have their acts together.  Ellen and I hope to go to the grand opening on May 13.

Sparks and Chris

Amanda picked the color.  All the suits had their panties in a wedge about it and now nobody can stop talking about how wonderful it is. Typical.

The building is a former Sears distribution center and this area at the top of the tower on the 14th floor housed a huge water tower to service the building. Future home of a great bar/restaurant.

 

I felt like I had the Golden Passport while in Memphis.  Sparks and Chris connected me to all of their friends in the arts community and I seemed like every door just fell open for me. I met their photographer friend Jamie Harmon at Amurica  and he showed me around his crazy studio.

He also invited me to a storytelling event started by his wife called Spillit which is very similar to The Moth (Moth podcasts have been my savior on my many long drives) and Durham NC's own The Monti. The theme of the night was "guts" and ran the gamut from hilarious chickening out stories to sobering stories of colon surgery. Folks put their name in a hat if they want to tell a story but everybody can join in the fun--on each seat was a piece of paper where you could write about the time you most famously chickened out and in between the main stories they would read those.  The most poignant moment of the evening came when the MC read "I almost chickened out coming here tonight.  That's why I was late. I am brand new to Memphis and I don't know anyone or have any friends here and I was nervous about coming." The MC stopped and said "this is supposed to be anonymous but I want to invite you to identify yourself so we can welcome you" and a young woman did and instantly 5 or 6 people got up and hugged her and said they wanted to be her friend and gave her their email addresses. It was such a sweet moment and typical of my experience in Memphis.

Another great stop was at the Dixon Museum and Gardens.  It was hosting a traveling exhibition called State of the Art which originated at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville Arkansas. Their curators visited the entire US and did more than a THOUSAND studio visits to find the best of the best or under recognized emerging and established artists working in the country.  Incredible show.

 

 

I managed to slip in a short visit to the famous Beale Street my last night there.

My final stop of the week was visiting my wonderful niece Natalie who lives and works for the Country Music Association in Nashville. Got to see her new house and groovy new office.

Off to Louisville, KY where I also have never been and always wanted to visit.. Thanks for being along for the ride.

 

 

The blues is like a planet.  It's an enormous topic.  You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from.  Without it, I don't know where I would be.  It's indelible and indispensable.  --Tom Waits

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable. Tom Waits
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/blues.html

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable. Tom Waits
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/blues.html

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable. Tom Waits
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/blues.html

The blues is like a planet. It's an enormous topic. You can't ignore the impact that it has had and continues to have on the whole musical culture. It's a tree that everyone is swinging from. Without it, I don't know where I would be. It's indelible and indispensable. Tom Waits
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/tomwaits

SABBATICAL WEEK THREE

Thank you all for following my journey. If you want to see images in a more timely manner you can either follow me on Instagram @cassilhaus or if you are not on Instagram you can simply Google #frankssabbatical or @cassilhaus and there are aggregators like http://www.imgrum.org/user/cassilhaus/3510596490 on the web that simply show all of my posts w/o being on Instagram.

Who knew there was a National Margarita Day???

Along Route 61 Hale County

Orrville, Alabama

 

Week three was a bit off the central thesis of my sabbatical. I didn't identify specific arts or residency related programs in the deep South that I wanted to visit but I had never really spent time in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas and I had heard much wonderful lore about spending time in the Alabama Black Belt and the Mississippi River Delta. This trip is hopefully as much about learning about advancing Cassilhaus as it is about learning about myself and the country I live in. It didn't take long to find amazing people and adventures in my next chosen destination.

When I was still in Georgia I asked a bunch of people what I should check out in Hale County, AL and I got the same response every time--visit with Pam Dorr and see the amazing community development and rural poverty work she is doing at HERO and check out the Auburn Rural Studio. Here is a bit about Pam from one of her TED talks.

Pam is so delightful, dynamic, and easy to be with and is a complete inspiration.  She is a force to be reckoned with and a walking community development machine. Between her housing initiatives, bamboo bike business, thrift store, pie lab, and others it was hard to keep up.

Her team is working on the renovation of the Martin Stewart School which was saved from demolition and moved to their campus in three parts and reassembled.  It is almost complete and one morning she had me help clean up and move bunks in place that will house design interns that come to Greensboro to help with her initiatives.

My introduction to Alabama was memorable.  I hadn't been in town for an hour when Pam invited me to dinner with her friends Tom and Stella Martin who have a place on the Black Warrior River just West of town.  What a stunning evening and an amazing home cooked meal with homemade key lime pie. In their back yard is the former main town dock for folks coming into Greensboro.  The river is still used extensively for commerce.

 

Pam housed me during my time there in another of her projects, the HERO bunkhouse.  I had the place to myself.  I got a new camera just before coming on this trip and I have been trying to carve out time to slog through the 600+ page manual so I can really exploit its capabilities. I dug in a bit at the bunkhouse and shot my first significant photo series in the wee hours of the morning the first morning I awoke there.  These images were all shot hand held at an astonishing 16000 ASA.  I've never seen a camera that can resolve so well in almost total darkness.

 

For a photography lover like me, Hale County Alabama is the stuff of legend from the work of William Christenberry and Walker Evans. A visit had long been on my bucket list. It is a bit of a photo cliche but i had to go shoot the famous Green Barn that Christenberry returned to again and again.

Being married to an architect means I haven't been able to miss hearing about the legendary Auburn University Rural Studio started by Sam "Sambo" Mockbee and D.K. Ruth. I spent the better part of two days seeing the campus and looking at present and past projects while giving my jealous spouse updates (she had not made the pilgrimage yet) and sending her photos.  This was sustainable architecture before anyone knew what that meant.

 

Main campus

Above two images are student designed, built, and occupied.  Students are responsible for building their dorms!

Outdoor classroom and greenhouse.

You think you've got a lot of projects going on......

Spectacular, brand new, and just christened outdoor work space. The lion's share of the entire structure was built by 4 students!

Out in the town of Faunsdale, AL, visiting professor Jake works in the pouring rain with a team of Rural Studio students to put a roof on a house they designed and built for a member of the community in need.  Like all of their projects this is done at no cost to the future home owner who currently lives in a trailer behind the building site.  This is one of the 20K prototype houses they call the "income house" and in the dogtrot design the 2br house is on the left and the studio on the right allows for income generating work to be done.

The recycle and reuse ethos is strong in this project using recycled carpet.  This was one of the very first RS projects done during Sam Mockbie's tenure.

 

Mary Cris, one of the Vista/Americorp workers in Pam's office invited me on a family pontoon boat outing on the Black Warrior River on a beautiful sunny afternoon.  Way fun and boy that boat could move!

 

Greensboro Alabama's location allowed some pretty great day trips.  I had heard much about the Quilters of Gees Bend but had no idea they were less than an hour from where I was.  Selma, a major site of the civil rights struggle, was also close by. On the way to Gees Bend I had arranged to sit in on a class at a high school in Uniontown, Alabama taught by a Teach for America teacher named Kara. My host for the next week of my trip, Ron Nurnberg, is director of TFA Mississippi so I thought I should get up to speed!  I hadn't been in a high school class in a LONG time and it was inspiring to watch Kara work her magic to inspire her kids to learn.

 

 

Gees Bend PO.

The National Park Interpretive Center right across from the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma was inspiring and very well done. I felt such sadness about all of the voter suppression that continues and is already getting worse under Trump.  How many times do we need to fight for the same thing? I walked across the bridge in both directions thinking about that awesome march and the sacrifices so many have made toward the goal of one man one vote.

 

My final stop of the week had me saying goodbye to Alabama and headed to Jackson, Mississippi. Back in December I attended a conference put on at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University by Elsewhere in Greensboro, NC (not to be confused with the Greensboro I just left) as part of its Southern Constellations series. The main presenter was a woman named Nia Umoja who is part of an unusual neighborhood development/anti gentrification project called The Cooperative Community of New West Jackson.

Again I am pretty far off my planned sabbatical thesis but I was incredibly impressed by what I heard at the conference and wanted to see it with my own eyes.  Nia generously put me up at their wonderful guest house in the community and took me on an extensive tour.  I am still going through a complex series of emotions about all that I saw.  Sobering and inspiring in equal measure.  I don't know how she does it all.  Did I mention she has 7 young children ??!!?

The cooperative hopes to develop a significant food economy in the neighborhood and this large community garden is one of the first steps.

One of the newly renovated houses in the neighborhood. All work in the neighborhood is done by people living in the neighborhood.

 

OK so I am officially exhausted now.  I can't believe this all happened in a week.  It takes me a week to document a week!  Thanks for sharing this journey with me.

 

"Change happens at the speed of trust"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SABBATICAL WEEK TWO

 

 

I am being driven forward

Into an unknown land.

The pass grows steeper,

The air colder and sharper.

A wind from my unknown goal

Stirs the strings

Of expectation.

 

Still the question:

Shall I ever get there?

There where life resounds,

A clear pure note

In the silence.

 

--Dag Hammarskjöld

 

On Sunday the 12th I said goodbye to Columbus and headed north to Decatur just outside of Atlanta. I was hosted by my dear friend Judy who I met the very first day of my freshman year at Duke and we've been friends for 40 years!

She was an exquisite hostess and I was excited about staying in one place for a week.  She even had a loaner cat for me named Luckie! I am really missing Ellen and Jaco and Joni.

There is an incredibly art scene in the Atlanta area. I had set up a bunch of meetings in advance. I met first with Jennifer Schwartz who runs the unique and innovative Crusade for Art. She indeed is a one woman crusade to expand the collector base and market for emerging photographic artists. Check out her site and see the cool programs she has initiated.  One is a $10,000 annual grant to the person who proposes the most innovative way to expand the market for photography. My favorite winner is the 2014 Start with Art program. I'd love to start a program like it in Durham in my spare time.

On Tuesday I had a studio visit with photographer Jerry Siegel. I love Jerry's work but I had never met him.

One of his incredibly potent portrait pieces was in the Do Good Show that we had at Cassilhaus. He is a very sweet guy and he showed me several bodies of work that I had never seen before.

He also gave me his stunning monograph Facing South featuring his portraits of southern artists.

Later in the day I visited AIR Serenbe, the artist in residence program associated with the planned Serenbe community Southwest of Atlanta. I met with the Executive Director Brandon Hinman and learned of their innovative funding model for their Focus Fellowships and there incredible National Advisory Board that proposes and selects artists.

I've done a fair amount of research on residency programs for this trip and one that kept coming up was the Hambidge Center Residency located on a stunning 600 acre site in far North Georgia right on the NC border.  it is the oldest residency program in the Southeast and was started by Mary Hambidge in 1934. 8-10 artists come at a time and form a cohort that shares a meal multiple nights a week. This dynamic interaction is something we don't have at Cassilhaus because we can accommodate only 1 artist or a collaborating couple at a time and it was energizing to witness. The executive director Jamie Badoud lives in Atlanta and travels the two hours up to Hambidge every other week and he generously offered to drive with me up there so I could pick his brain and also offered to put me up for the night.  We were joined by his brand new director of developement Kate who was also making her first trip there.

Jamie saw my big camera bag and asked if I would make some photos of the artists in their studios that they could use on their website. Here The Kates, a new music and contemporary dance collaboration duo, talk about their process with Jamie.

Several of the artists in the current cohort have been at Hambidge before.  Returning multi-media artist from Atlanta Ashley Anderson was working on a cyanotype project involving video game imagery.

One of the things that I was most excited about in visiting Hambidge was that Jamie and his Board have just completed a strategic visioning process for the next 3 years and that is the process I am just beginning to think about. Jamie was very generous in sharing his experience in so many areas of interest for me. On the way back to Atlanta Jamie treated me to a fabulous detour to Mountain House Modern, the Scogin/Elam designed home of one of their supporters. Chester and Steven gave us the grand tour!

On Friday I had an A-M-A-Z-I-N-G meeting with Amy Miller, the Executive Director of Atlanta Celebrates Photography.  I didn't go there to talk with her about my work with our own Click! photography festival but rather just to meet her and pick her brain about residency and art center programs of interest but she spent a ton of time giving me valuable insights and experience in dealing with the growth of a photo festival. They are way further along in their development than the fledgling Click! Festival and her help was invaluable.

I capped off the week with a trip with Judy to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta which had an exhibition of three of my photo heroes up-Diane Arbus, Gary Winogrand, and Richard Avedon.

The star of our visit was a stainless steel piece by Anish Kapoor from 2010.

 

 

That's all for now. I'm off to Alabama!

 

"A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SABBATICAL WEEK ONE

A reminder to those who receive this post via email subscription that formatting will be better and reading easier if you go directly to my blog here to read.

I'm on the road on the first leg of my trip and it's already a wild and wonderful ride. 1100 miles. 4 states. 2 time zones. I got off to a rough start with being sick the whole first week but soldiering on. Even though I've done a sabbatical like this twice before in 1986 (South Pacific) and 2000 (Western US)  this still feels like nothing I've ever done before. The last two were pre-cell phone, email, GPS, bluetooth, iTunes, phone apps, airbnb etc.  I had paper maps, an FM radio, and pay phone booths and I stayed in youth hostels and cheap hotels. Now I've got voice activated GPS (Samantha), Google Maps, screens full of iPhone apps, Siri DJing virtually unlimited music and streaming it to my car stereo, video Facetime calls, and constant connection with text and email.  Generous friends and strangers are putting me up and taking me under their wings. Figuring out exactly how to "disconnect" is an interesting conundrum but my stress level is down markedly and my anti-Trump shield has been deployed.

Charleston, SC and my friends Mark Sloan and Michelle Van Parys welcomed me for the first 4 days of my journey and put me up in a wonderful apartment at the College of Charleston as a visiting "scholar."

I did a bit of walking around the city but mostly just needed to unwind and unpack my car and my mind to figure out what the next few months might look like.  Mark directs the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and has been a mentor to me for some time. Everything he does at the Halsey is at a world class level and he has much to teach. I listened and took a lot of notes.  I also got a detailed advance look at the artists and work in the amazing new Southbound photography exhibit that he and co-curator Mark Long have spent the last few years putting together and that will debut at the Halsey and travel widely afterwards. What a treat-SO MUCH incredible work and many artists that I was not previously familiar with.

Meetings had to be held over food. It's a pretty giant mix of topics running around in my brain for this trip. Everything from the nitty gritty details of best practices for running an arts organization and artist residency to bigger and longer range topics like governance, engaging your community, defining your audience, and thinking about legacy issues. I am figuring out the questions as I go.

One of the challenges I anticipated was finding a way to keep up my exercise routine on the road. My wonderful cousins Sean (an Olympic swimmer) and Renee connected me to an amazing website to locate public swimming pools worldwide and it has been amazing. I have already swum at 4 different pools!

On the 9th I headed to Augusta GA to see an exhibition called The Female Lens at the Morris Museum with work from the Do Good Fund collection of Southern Photography.  There was a panel discussion and Q&A with the Director Alan Rothschild and two of the represented artists, Jill Frank and Tamara Reynolds.

Alan has been a friend since our Do Good show at Cassilhaus and I was thrilled to meet and share an evening with Jill and Tamara whose work I knew but had never met. I discovered at the last moment that I had a long lost cousin Jill Uhler in Aiken, SC, very close to Augusta, who hosted me for the evening and was able to join me for the talk and dinner afterwards.

 

Word on the street had it that the Possum Trot in Seale, AL was not to be missed on Friday night so I headed there next.

 

Seale is also the home of The Museum of Wonder and my artist friend Butch Anthony. I met Butch about 20 years ago at an artist retreat and purchased a table from him that we have on our deck. He is a lovable character and an amazing artist.

 

The land where the museum sits has been in his family for generations and he has been working on it since he was a child.

I couldn't resist taking this one home and adding it to our collection.  We are definitely not in Kansas anymore.

Another of Butch's recent initiatives is the world's first drive-thru art gallery.

The drive-thru is just up the road from Butch's house and he drove 6! of us there in a huge white Cadillac that he recently bought from Leon Russell. Butch of course has added quite a bit of adornment.

Columbus GA, home of Alan Rothschild and the Do Good Fund, is right across the Chattahoochee River from Seale and was one of the first points of interest I put on my sabbatical map. I spent the weekend picking Alan's brain about a score of topics and he was amazingly generous.  I love his model of getting his collection out to the people in often non traditional venues.  His collection is always working and not gathering dust in storage! As an attorney he was also a wealth of information about governance and legacy issues. One of the highlights of my weekend that Alan arranged was a private tour of Pasaquan, a visionary art environment in Buena Vista GA by its director Mike McFall.  My pictures will not do it justice.  Check out a basic video here and a detailed video on the complete restoration of the site by the Kohler Foundation here.

Alan, Caretaker Charles, and Mike

It has been an extraordinary first week.  My head is spinning with ideas and questions.  This doesn't feel like a vacation and it doesn't feel like work but I am not exactly sure what it is.  I do know that it is an extraordinary opportunity and that I am blessed to have a wife, a family, a business partner, an amazing circle of friends, and a community that supports my doing it. I have always been lucky with pretty special travel karma and this trip has already proven that it is not waning.  Each door I open leads to several more and I have been met with nothing but generosity of spirit and sharing of experiences. Thank you. I need to check the batteries in the Trump shield. I will report on week two in Atlanta and points north in my next post.

 

 

 

TAKE A RISK

TRUST YOURSELF

NEVER GIVE UP

T-shirt spotted in New Zealand on my first sabbatical trip that has become my travel mantra.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CASSILHAUS 2.0 SABBATICAL JOURNEY

Ellen saying goodbye yesterday morning.

 

Today starts a great adventure!  Under the general rubric of Cassilhaus 2.0 and with an eye toward learning best practices, increasing our impact in the community, and laying the initial framework for a legacy beyond our own stewardship, I am embarking on an ambitious five month sabbatical journey throughout the US to visit arts/community-focused individuals, organizations, and institutions that share some similar programming and structural characteristics to our own and who are interested in sharing experiences and expertise for our (hopefully) mutual benefit. As a member of the Alliance of Artist Communities I also hope to visit select residency programs throughout the US.

I'm kicking things off in Charleston, SC with my dear friend and mentor Mark Sloan, a former Cassilhaus AIR and director of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art here. Stay tuned to this channel for updates on the trip. You can also follow me on Instagram @cassilhaus. Hopefully I can also get caught up on overdue blog posts from recent exhibitions and AIRs.  Hope springs eternal.......

Frank

 

It is counterintuitive to welcome insecurity as a sign that something good is beginning. I have never greeted it as a friend. But I know that that is where the work is done, and that premature comfort is a pretty good sign that nothing much is happening.

-- Sean Kernan

 

For an idea that does not at first seem insane, there is no hope.

--Albert Einstein

 

Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. 

--Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Sometimes you have to go out there to get in there.

 --Trish Thomas

 

ALAN BUR JOHNSON

Alan Bur Johnson's work is not easy to categorize.  It is a fascinating mix of art and science.  I first saw his work in the home of my friend Lisa Sette who represents Alan's work at her gallery in Phoenix AZ. The piece was a dazzler from his Swarm series. (Click to enlarge photos)

The bulk of his work involves photo scan transparencies of insect and other specimens sandwiched together inside metal rings and mounted to the wall with dissection pins. The assemblages can get quite large and are extremely time intensive to install.

We've known and trusted Lisa Sette for a long time and had already hosted two of her other artists, Marie Navarre and Mayme Kratz in our residency program with wild success so we jumped at the chance to have Alan join us in August 2016.  The timing of his visit was such that he arrived the day before we were to have the 3rd annual Cassilhaus Contemporary Curator Camp and he really wanted to have one of his pieces up for them to see so the poor guy had to spend his first 24 hours here working to install a new piece called Mapping Avienne.  I asked Alan about the title--"Nola Avienne.  Dear friend, unusual artist, phlebotomist and bee keeper, just to name a few.  Her work addresses her body, as a result of injuries received falling through a trap door on a stage.  She did a series of paintings on vellum based upon scans of her brain.  I purchased one at the time I was composing this piece.  Uncanny similarities between the two pieces"

Alan starts with a highly detailed template that indicated the location of every unique element and the distance off the wall that it will mount.

He then inserts a pin at each mount point to mark the wall and then moves the template to the side and begins the installation.  All of the components are stored in a binder.

 

Alan had these tiny springs fabricated that hold each ring against the head of the pin so it does not flap freely in the breeze but still allows enough movement that the pieces feel alive.

Like several artists before him, the 1600 acres of Duke Forest below Cassilhaus was a huge draw for Alan.  He spent countless hours in the woods collecting specimens for future pieces. I can't wait to see what he comes up with.

I hope to visit Alan in Jerome AZ this summer.  Maybe I will find something that came out of his wanderings.  Thank you Alan!

 

"Two chemicals called actin and myosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles in insect wings to contract and relax. Thus, insects learned to fly. When one of those paired molecules are absent, wings will grow but they cannot flap and are therefore useless. Today, the same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart, and when one is absent, the person's heartbeat is inefficient and weak, ultimately leading to heart failure. Again, science marvels at the way molecules adapt over millions of years, but isn't there a deeper intent? In our hearts, we feel the impulse to fly, to break free of boundaries. Isn't that the same impulse nature expressed when insects began to take flight? The prolactin that generates milk in a mother's breast is unchanged from the prolactin that sends salmon upstream to breed, enabling them to cross from saltwater to fresh."   --Deepak Chopra

JOHN ACORN SCULPTURE EXHIBITION

John Acorn during his artist talk at Cassilhaus

My good friend Ron Djuren is an insatiable art lover and collector and one of our frequent flyer visitors at Cassilhaus.  Ron has turned me on to so many amazing artists. He is an architect and went to school at Clemson.  While there his mentor was an artist and teacher named John Acorn and Ron served as his assistant for many years. They shared a home town of Patterson NJ and a deep love of art.  Acorn got his MFA at Cranbrook and was chair of the art department at Clemson for more than two decades.  Ron showed me a few of John's pieces in his collection and had been gently nudging me to do a show of his work here at the gallery for some time.  We had a slot in the summer of 2016 and we were delighted to do an exhibition.  Ron and John curated it and arranged for all of the work, some of it quite large, to be transported here.

  We had never done an exclusively sculpture show and it was amazing to see the gallery with so many 3D works.

pieces from the camouflage man series

L-R Our friend Janet with Ron and his partner Kim

 

John gave his artist talk in the gallery among the pieces which made for a lively discussion.  The work was potent with some of the imagery very dark with demons of the past while others were much more light hearted.

Ron and John thanks for stretching us and sharing this amazing work with our community.

 

 

 

Frank Hunter

Frank in the Cassihaus artist apartment washing prints

I've known Frank Hunter since I think around 2000 when I discovered his work in New Mexico which was ironic as he was living in Chapel Hill at the time.  He used to teach at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and is an acknowledged master of the 19th century platinum/palladium photo printing process. I purchased a piece of his in 2002 called Curtain Saul to Paul which was printed on translucent vellum and it took my breath away. I assure you that the jpeg does not do it justice!

When I went to frame it everything I tried just made it look flat.  I was looking at it up to the light and it just glowed.  I worked with my framer friends at Craven Allen Gallery and they came up with a way to frame it with glass on both sides and we have it sitting in a north facing window in the house and it is stunning.

rear view

front view

 

I lost touch with Frank for awhile until I decided to include him in our Actual Size exhibition. I was stunned all over again at the quality of his work and stunning tonal nuance of his prints.  We added a few more of his pieces to our collection. The really telling thing to me about these acquisitions is that we have virtually zero traditional landscapes in our collection. Frank's work seems to transcend that categorization to some sort of pure beauty.

Frank told me when I contacted him about the show that he was no longer printing platinum work as he no longer had a darkroom.  I was stunned and thought that was a huge loss.  I asked him if I could connect him to darkroom space if he would come to the residency and he agreed.  He ended up finding the darkroom space himself and he made some amazing prints while here.  When it came time for Frank to give his artist talk I asked him if wanted to do a test run on his PowerPoint presentation and he told me he wasn't going to use a computer or show any of his work except actual prints.  Once I got over the initial shock of a photographer giving an artist talk without showing digital images it was a delight to hear him just talk about his philosophy of making work.

The place was packed with photographers.  Frank has had many students through his years of teaching.

Thank you Frank for sharing your time and your beautiful work.

 

 

 

 

HORSE & BUGGY PRESS 20TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

 

Dave Wofford is one of those guys that everybody seems to know. I can't even remember when I met him but he and his letterpress/fine art book/graphic design enterprise Horse & Buggy Press are Durham institutions. Dave approached me about doing a 20th Anniversary exhibition of his work from the press at Cassilhaus and I was completely on board but unclear about exactly what that might entail.  WHOA. Dave had big plans!  He wanted to mount the show here and then travel it to CAM Raleigh. He wanted to have custom furniture designed for the exhibition. He wanted to have a music room. He wanted to have a stocked liquor cabinet. We wanted to have 5 programming events featuring authors/poets/musicians/makers during the run of the show. He wanted to feature a gigantic amount of beautiful work. He REALLY didn't want to overwhelm me.

Fortunately Dave is an organizing machine. I would get these 5 page emails almost daily with excruciating detail of when he was going to install which pieces and where they would go and how they would connect to each other and what did I think. Dave has such an incredible design sense that it quickly became clear that I just needed to say, "Dave that sounds great.  Have at it." It was certainly the most ambitious and involved exhibition we have ever mounted.  Guys started showing up installing shelves and leather chairs and custom bench cushions started appearing.

Dave has built such an extraordinary community of artists and makers and he conducted them like a symphony. Folks he had worked with 20 years ago and just last week were all featured and came together to help produce this extraordinary remembrance and celebration. We opened in early May 2016. What he wanted most was for people to spend time with the 18+ books he had created. Real time.  Not like a normal art exhibitions where pieces get a glance or a short dwell time.  He decided to schedule reading days where people could just come and spend time with the work.  Rather than reinvent the wheel here I am linking to Dave's newsletter here which details the participants and programming during the run of the show. 

The exhibition looked magnificent.

And the crowds were enthusiastic.

One of the highlights for me of the programming events was Allan Gurganus' reading from his short story It Had Wings which Dave produced a beautiful limited edition book version of.

Thank you Dave for bringing so much beauty into the world.

 

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

--Franz Kafka

 

 

 

 

 

LOVE VALLEY

One of the great joys of my work at Cassilhaus is getting to work with students.  We have an annual internship program where I work with MFA students from Duke and UNC, usually one per year. I usually take students focused on still photography rather than moving image folks. 2015-16 was the first time we had two interns-one from Duke, Michaela O'Brien (left below) and one from UNC, Alyssa Miserdino.  I couldn't make a decision which one to take. :) The interns and I spend time interacting with our visiting artists, learning archival framing, working with all aspects of mounting a gallery exhibition including curating, installation, and lighting, and spend time learning how to manage and maintain an art collection. Ellen and I couldn't run this place without them.

 

Michaela and Alyssa brandishing their lethal ATG guns after finishing the framing on Susan Worsham's Margaret's Rhubarb

One of the great perks of the internship program is the possibility of mounting their final MFA final thesis exhibition at Cassilhaus and students must defend their work in front of their full committee here. Degrees are actually conferred in the house! How cool is that? We have done exhibitions for all three of our Duke interns (UNC does not allow offsite exhibitions), Lisa McCarty, Rachel Boillot, and Michaela O'brien whose Love Valley exhibition I talk about here. Students always push me to stretch the boundaries of what we can do in an exhibition and Michaela pushed the hardest to date with 6 video elements, three dimensional found objects, silk screened prints and objects, photographs, hand painted images and frames, collage, scrap books from the founders, and a taxidermied animal. She even found a trove of original 4x5" film negatives from an original resident of Love Valley in the 50s and superimposed pairs of them to make dynamic new compositions.

Initial layout of all elements with old exhibition still hanging.

The makings of a three screen video installation with surround sound in the Girl Power Room

Michaela fabricating the shelf for the video installation.

Michaela discovered Love Valley by accident and fell in love with the town and its people and began documenting it for her thesis. The exhibition was the first of its kind anywhere and brought together historical imagery (photos and movie film) and objects with contemporary work she shot over her multiple visits during her MFA program. 

This background from her exhibition text--

Love Valley is currently listed on Visit North Carolina’s tourism website under the "quirky” section of “Things To Do.” Nestled in the foothills of the Brushy Mountains, the township, founded in 1954, allows only horse and foot traffic on its Main Street, a dirt road lined with less than a dozen buildings of rough
hewn timber made to look a century old. This scene, that brings to mind a John Wayne movie, also conjures an eerie ghostliness at quieter times of day.

Founder Andy Barker’s boyhood dream of a cowboy haven is home to a population which hovers at about 100 people. Ellenora, his now 95-year-old Alzheimic widow, preserves a record of his utopian aspirations in a rarely accessed, dusty, wood-planked room where cabinets are filled with reels of film, medium and large format photographic negatives and piles of scrapbooks.

In this .2 square mile community, reenactment forms an important aspect of social life even as nostalgia contends with everyday realities. Residents attempt to shape and reshape the township around their founder’s vision of a Western town full of “good, clean fun.” In Love Valley, men, women, children, and animals each tussle for a place somewhere between an idealized past and an elusive future.

My time living on Main Street resulted in this fragmented narrative of frontier freedom. This assemblage is an oblique museum, an impulse to document, and a document of that impulse. In  Love Valley, the complete story is eschewed for the remains: a constellation of biblical and patriotic gestures, and what lies at the heart of it all, the desire to start over.

 

 

 

Michaela's Thesis Committee L-R David Gatten, Tom Rankin, Shambhavi Kaul

The opening was a smash.

Ellen's been dying for an opportunity to wear this outfit from her mother.  Yee-Ha!

One of the exciting codas to the exhibition was a visit from descendants (photo above and below) of the founders of Love Valley. They loved the exhibition and took a stroll down memory lane looking at old pictures of their parents and friends.

Thank you Michaela.  It was a joy to work with you and you knocked it out of the park with your thesis project and exhibition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sohei Nishino

As a reminder, if you are reading this post from an email you received it will be a much better reading experience if you go directly to my blog here.

 

        

Every year Ellen and I go to the AIPAD photo fair in NYC. We each have a different way and pace of going through all of the gallery booths and we usually split up and reconvene at the end of the day to compare our favorites. It is still surprising to me how often we not only discover the same photographer but often the same image.  At the 2015 fair Ellen was very excited about a young Japanese artist at the Michael Hoppen Gallery named Sohei Nishino that I had totally missed and I couldn't quite figure out what she was talking about until I saw it with my own eyes. We were intrigued and decided to invite him to the residency.  He came in April of 2016 and was our first artist from Asia and one of the youngest artists we had ever hosted.

Sohei makes these gigantic "diorama" city maps comprised of thousands of tiny 35mm contact prints, all shot with a conventional film camera and developed and printed in the darkroom, that he has meticulously collaged together to form a geographically stylized but very representational map of major cites of the world. We learned that he had just recently had been commissioned by SFMOMA to do a map of San Francisco for the reopening of the museum in 2016 which was a huge deal. In June we made a trip to San Francisco and Sohei arranged a fabulous tour of the new museum with Corey Keller, the chief photography curator.

This recent video from SFMOMA covers the history of the diorama project pretty well and the video below showing the time lapse production of the complete map of Amsterdam is fascinating.

 

 

 

 

We always try to encourage our artists to do ambitious new projects when they come and tell them we can connect them with scholars and resources that will help them stretch.  Be careful what you wish for!  Sohei said he had worked exclusively in urban environments and since he was coming to a forested location he said he wanted to do something with nature. He said he had researched Duke Forest and that he wanted to do macro photographs of yellow slime mold!

I was so not ready for that and was bracing myself for a week of Googling slime mold and trying to find someone who knew something about it. I swear I am not making this up--THAT EVENING I went to an opening at the Nasher Museum at Duke University and ran into my freshman biology teacher from 1976, Dr. David McClay. Dave had been to a few Cassilhaus events and knew about the residency program and I said, "I had the craziest request from a visiting artist-he wants to shoot macro photographs of yellow slime mold." Without missing a beat Dave said "we have one of the top yellow slime mold experts in the world working in our lab AND we work with another scholar who is an expert in photographing slime mold."  Who knew???? I was so happy we were able to connect Sohei to these experts before he arrived.

When Sohei got here he almost immediately started taking trips into the forest-with some trepidation at first.  He is a city boy. I was a bit bummed that he never mentioned anything about yellow slime mold but was photographing for hours every day. About a week in he asked me if I had a very large piece of paper. Not thinking much about it I gave him some black craft paper that I used for picture framing.  Two pieces about 3'x7'. Before I knew it he had tacked the paper to the wall in the studio and had started mounting small contact prints.  HE WAS MAKING A MAP OF DUKE FOREST!

 

Click to enlarge any of the photographs

 

It was so exciting that he was starting a whole new kind of map here during his residency.  Even he didn't expect to make something like this as he was using non archival paper and Elmer's glue.  He said he was just experimenting and before he knew it he had a completed piece called New Hope Creek which is the name of the creek below the house.  He asked if we could photograph it so we mounted it to a sheet of luan plywood and took it out on the deck to shoot.

We borrowed a 4x5 film camera so he could get a high resolution shot.

Believe it or not Sohei had it shipped back to Tokyo.  We were so honored that it is its own Work category on his website.

 

Arigato Sohei

 

 

 PS.  2016 was a big year for Sohei.  After Cassilhaus and the SFMOMA commission he tied the knot with his lovely bride Miho.

 

Actual Size

Sheesh! I can't believe it has been six months since I did a post.  New Year's resolution to get caught up!

Paul Caponigro  Two Pears, Cushing, ME  Vintage Gelatin Silver Contact Print 1999

In late 2015 we opened a show at Cassilhaus called Actual Size: Exploring the Photographic Contact Print which I curated with help from my friend Eliot Dudik and others. A true contact print in photography is a print made when the negative is put in direct contact with the photo sensitive medium, usually photo paper, and exposed and processed in a darkroom. By definition the finished print is the same size as the negative which usually means that the camera used has to be as large as the negative i.e. an 8x10" contract print comes from a 8x10" negative which was made with an 8x10" view camera. These prints are stunningly sharp and subtle as there is no loss in quality from an enlargement process. As with all things photo, there are a ton of alternates and exceptions-analog/digital hybrids, camera-less photograms, enlarged digital negatives, etc. The use of the word “exploring” in the title of the exhibition was intentional as not all of the images in the exhibition are true contact prints and, given that virtually all photographs prior to the early 1900s were contact-printed, a comprehensive survey of the subject would be beyond the scope of this exhibition.

A little less than half of the works in the exhibition were drawn from the Cassilhaus Collection with the balance being generously loaned by artists, collectors, and galleries across the country. As with many of our exhibitions, this one started with a simple and innocent enough notion—in this case, to pull together some of the contemporary contact prints from our collection and do a small show. Never wanting to miss an opportunity to make my life vastly more complicated, however, I fell deeply down the Contact Print rabbit hole. A very short and crazy 2 1/2 months later we had a beautiful exhibition of nearly 80 works by 46 artists spanning 150 years of the history of photography and a score of different formats and negative sizes from 35mm to 30”x40.” As I look back at the gallery guide now I honestly don't know where I found the energy to go in so many directions including a survey of historical processes and a small sub-exhibition on 35mm contact sheets. The upside as always is that I learned a ton and met amazing new artists and collectors. My artist and gallery friends were unbelievably generous in loaning extraordinary and valuable prints including work by Frederick Sommer, Olivia Parker, Burk Uzzle, Harry Callahan, E.O. Goldbeck, Timothy O'Sullivan, Chris McCaw, and Alex Harris. I am particularly in the debt of Jim and Jane Finch for the loan of all of the historical works in the exhibition. Jim’s enthusiasm for photography collecting in general and historic sub-genres in particular is practically explosive and he is incredibly generous with his time and knowledge.

Frederick Sommer  Venus, Jupiter, and Mars  1949
8”x10” Gelatin Silver Contact Print

Edouard Baldus  Notre-Dame, Paris  1852-1853
Salted Paper Contact Print from Paper Negative

One exciting discovery in the show was learning that our print El Ensueño (The Daydream) by Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo was in fact an 8"x10" contact print and not an enlargement from a 4"x5" negative. This was confirmed by his granddaughter Aurelia when researching his work for an exhibtion.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo  El Ensueño (The Daydream)  8"x10" Gelatin Silver Print 1931

 

I always love it when work sells from the exhibition as our main mission is to support the work of artists.  We sold a number of pieces but I was most excited about placing this stunning David Scheinbaum piece with an airbnb tenant who was visiting during the exhibition!

    

David Scheinbaum  Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs, Colorado  1994
8”x10” Toned/Waxed Gelatin Silver Contact Print 

 

As sometimes happens I get so attached to pieces in a show here that I can't let them go. We added Binh Dahn's amazing Chlorophyll Print and Frank Hunter's stunning platinum print to our collection after the exhibition came down.

Binh Dahn  Found Portrait: Man 29  2006
Chlorophyll Contact Print and Resin

Binh developed this almost unbelievable process of contact printing a negative onto a living growing leaf!  He clips his negative to a large leaf on a plant growing on his deck and allows it to be exposed for over a week.  Exploiting the photosynthesis process, dark areas of the negative don't allow light to pass and chlorophyll does not get to that area of the leaf and it stays brown and light areas allow the green to form and make a positive image from the negative. When he has a properly exposed "print" he clips the leaf off and submerges it in clear resin which fixes it and stops the development process.  Truly remarkable.  This series is emotionally challenging and features images of prisoners killed in the Cambodian genocide but Danh has found a unique way to pay homage to these lost lives.

 

Frank Hunter  Back-lighted Beech  1996    8”x10” Platinum Palladium Contact Print   

 

The exhibition featured a significant number of prints from two portfolios in our collection.  Ralph Steiner's Portfolio III is a wonderful series of tiny contact prints made in the 1920s in NYC and James Fee's SS United States portfolio explores every corner of this historically significant cruise ship.

Ralph Steiner  Clothesline  1925  Gelatin Silver Contact Print

James Fee   Untitled from SS United States Portfolio  1997
8”x10” Toned Gelatin Silver Contact Print

 

I was extremely proud of the show.  It looked great and the opening was a smash and a lot of people toured the exhibit.

 

14 of the Steiner prints were hung together.

This was the historical area of the exhibition.  In the foreground are two contact printing devices.  I found the amazing one on the right on eBay for 25$. It had a red safe light so photographers could work in the darkroom and see what they were doing without exposing the photo paper.  There were many variants but they all had in common keeping perfect contact between negative and  photo paper so the image would be perfectly in focus.

The two images above were from the contact sheet portion of the exhibition. I was able to borrow vintage contact sheets from Burk Uzzle and Alex Harris.  On the left above Alex blew up the contact sheet to a 30x40" digital print so you could see the fun sequence of a "Christ is the Answer" billboard being painting onto a barn in Jones County NC in 1971. Burk provided a vintage contact sheet from the Woodstock festival in 1969.

Participating photographer Fredrik Marsh graciously loaned us his beautiful 14"x17" view camera which he used to make his piece in the show.

Eliot Dudik brought a carload of his students from William and Mary to the opening and took the back roads to Cassilhaus and had his students shoot with 4"x5" cameras to make contact prints later as an assignment.

As part of the programming during the run of the exhibition I asked Eliot Dudik and Leah Sobsey to do a joint artist talk and speak about their work in the show.  They worked really well together.

 

 

“The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance.” – Ansel Adams

 

 

Cassilhaus Stats

 

 

I gave a presentation in November last year at Texas State University San Marcos on the Cassilhaus model of engaging community.  As part of developing that presentation I compiled various statistics about our residency program, our exhibition program, and our art collection and it was a fascinating and illuminating exercise and will help us shape what we do going forward.  Here is the breakdown of basic demographic statistics about our residency program:

I find it fascinating that we have had, through no overt planning, almost a perfect bell curve of ages of our residents.  In our invitations for 2017 and 2018 we have increased both our geographic and racial diversity. It is clear that our first love is photography but we continue to invite artists who work in many media including non visual arts.

 

And what we learned about our exhibition program:

I was surprised to find such a strong skew toward female artists in our exhibition program.

 

And a few stats on our collection:

That's all for now.  All of our programs are continually evolving with the prime driving force being keeping it new and exciting and different from what we have done before.

Mark Steinmetz

 

I have been a fan of Mark Steinmetz's work for nearly 2 decades. I'd been trying to get him to come here for the Cassilhaus residency for years but he was always booked up.  In 2015 he agreed to a 5-day micro residency in collaboration with the Duke MFA|EDA program where he stayed and worked at Cassilhaus and then taught and critiqued the MFA students. He also gave an artist talk and we got to see his most recent work. Mark is based in Athens, GA and is a photographers' photographer.  Ask any group of photographers who their top 5 favorite photo artists are and Mark is almost always on that list.  He is a brilliant printer and authored some of the most compelling images in our collection. In collaboration with Nazraeli Press, he also produces stunning limited edition photobooks that sell out very quickly.

Athens, GA (Girl on Hood of Car) 1996

Carey, Farmington, GA 1996

Along the Seine, 1985

Olivia Parker

Once again I am ages behind on blog posts. Jumping right on our final 2015 artists-in-residence!  I fell in love with the work of photographer

 
portrait of Olivia Parker at Cassilhaus by Eliot Dudik

Olivia Parker way back in 2000 while on a sabbatical journey in the Southwest US.  This was pre-cell phone and pre-email--at least for me. I was brand new to photography collecting and very green. I was solo and wandering around Santa Fe, NM. I went to a public pay phone booth and looked in the YELLOW PAGES!!! for photography galleries. I reached Janet Russek of Scheinbaum & Russek and she explained that they didn't have a bricks and mortar gallery but that she and her husband were both photographers and private photography dealers that worked out of their home.  I was totally intimidated and told them I had been collecting photography for less than a year but they were unbelievably gracious and invited me over.  It was love at first meeting. I loved both Janet's work as well as her husband David Scheinbaum's.  They had just received a large cache of work from a private estate that they were selling.  Janet showed me a small 4x5" contact print by Olivia Parker

 

called Miss Appleton's Shoes II from 1976 that was about the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was truly my first experiences with falling in love with a photograph as an object. It was a precious jewel. You can't see it well in this reproduction but Parker pioneered the use of a process called split toning and there are rich flesh toned highlights to the photograph that makes it look almost like a color photo. Janet shared a lot of Olivia's work through prints (they represent her) and her books. I spent literally DAYS with Janet and David and they really took me under their wing and began the process of teaching me about fine art photography. I left their home with one of Janet's photos, one of David's, and my first Olivia Parker. They are dear friends to this day and I see them almost every year. I never imagined I would ever meet Olivia though.

Fast forward 14 years almost to the day.  Let me just say that the only thing more amazing than OBLITERATING your photo hero bucket list is doing it without knowing it was going to happen.  I was up at the AIPAD photo fair in NYC and I run into my photographer friend Mona Kuhn.  She tells me our mutual friend Heather Snider, who Ellen and I just visited over the holidays in San Francisco and was just made the new Executive Director of SF Camerawork, is going to be in town trying to network with photographers and galleries to garner donations for their big annual photo auction. Mona tells Heather she should crash the private party (Mona WAS invited) at Pace McGill honoring the new curator at CCP Joshua Chuang (he has since left). I had asked Heather to go to dinner so she tells me I should come along for a brief stop at Pace before we go out.  So when we get to Pace it is packed and just as we get off the elevator someone clinks a glass and Peter McGill is introducing Joshua. I look to my left and I am standing beside Anne Wilkes Tucker and to my right is Lee Friedlander with a camera around his neck. I’d met Anne on several occasions but Friedlander is a giant for me and I’d never met him.  I look around the room and I spot Danny Lyon and Larry Fink.  After brief remarks I walk into one of the adjacent galleries and spot Emmet Gowin.  We chat for a while and I realize the woman beside him is his wife Edith! OMG Edith at Chincoteague is my favorite photo in the world.  I’m floating at this point. I head over to thank Mona and while we are chatting a woman comes up to hug her and it’s so loud I can’t hear who she is.  I introduce myself and she says “hi I’m Olivia Parker.”  OMG2. I figure I am not going to get this chance again so I talk to her about the residency and Mona gives her the thumbs up and SHE WANTS TO COME! So now I’m school girl giddy. I then get a text from our former AIR Rachel Perry who has come down from Boston with David Hilliard (whose work is our next exhibition) and wants to have a drink. We zoom over there and I tell my tales of the previous hour and David describes my expression as post-coital.  That about says it all.

dinner first night in town at Ju-Ju

Fast forward again to October 2015 for Olivia's time here in residence.  I had learned that Olivia's husband John was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's Disease and had moved into a care facility.  Olivia had been a full time care giver for the prior several years and had been unable to do much creative work. She proposed working on a very interesting yet personally challenging project around her husband's illness.  She had been photographing objects that John had left lying around the house and proposed to represent photographically and conceptually how the images would evolve as John's perceptive ability changed.

She was seeking feedback on the project in the very early stages and I was able to connect her with two amazing photographers here--Alex Harris and Margaret Sartor. They came by the house and offered an informal "portfolio" review. It was fascinating to be a fly on the wall!

Olivia's work, at least the work I have seen, is all still life and she has taken this concept to a very inventive level. She shot a lot while she was here and was gathering imagery that will appear in future image composites.

Olivia was well known for her early analog darkroom work but was also a very early pioneer in digital photography and was one of the first photographers to work with Graham Nash at Nash Editions in the country's first digital lab. Her facility with using digital capture and compositing images was awe-inspiring. On one of my visits to her studio here I found she was working with india ink and using grasses from our garden to overpaint prints in the series she was working on.

One night we had Olivia over for dinner and she commented on the skin of the cantaloupe Ellen had just brought in from the garden. She exclaimed that it would make an exquisite form to ink her prints with. You can see the inked version above.  A month after she returned home she surprised us with a gift of this extraordinary original print that she had taken in our artist's apartment.

Olivia gave a wonderful talk while she was here.

One of the things that excites me most about our residency program is when mid and late career artists can share their experience and vision with younger emerging artists in our community.  Olivia was so generous with her time when she was here. Here she is holding court with a group of photographers at Lori Vrba's house.

Clockwise from left Rylan Steele, Bryce Lankard, Caitlin Kelley, Lori Vrba, Eliot Dudik, Olivia Parker

She also allowed Eliot Dudik to make portraits of her, one of which is at the top of this post.

Photograph by Tom Rankin

Thank you Olivia for fulfilling a dream and sharing your time and beautiful work so generously.

 

 

Hannah Frieser and Charles Guice

I went to FotoFest in 2014.  It is much more of a photographers' show than a collectors' show but it is a wonderful place to see great new work and meet lots of folks in the photo community.  They have, I think, one of the largest, if not the largest portfolio review programs in the world over three weeks every other March and it is an incredible opportunity for photographers at all career stages to be in front of the top leaders in the photo world.  I am uncomfortable doing reviews myself but I love to sit in on them. When I was there, my friend Del Zogg took me under his wing and let me sit in on his reviews. While I was on the review floor I looked around to see if there was anybody else I knew so I could keep doing it the next day and I spotted my friend Charles Guice who I had gotten to know as a gallerist. I spent a fascinating day with Charles and he asked if I wanted to sit in with the women reviewing next to him, Hannah Frieser, the next day. I didn't know Hannah but I was having the time of my life and I had already met an artist i wanted to invite to the residency (David Pace) and decided to purchase work from another artist (Cheryle St. Onge) so I agreed. Hannah's memory freaked me out. Some of the photographers she was reviewing she had previously reviewed at venues around the world and some as long as a decade prior. She not only remember bodies of work from these photographers but specific images and was able to plot the arc of their work over their careers.  I was struggling to remember the name of the artist who had just left the table! All of the reviews I sat through were thoughtful and helpful but I had never experienced anyone like Hannah.  I decided to invite her to our residency.  In addition to 9 years directing Light Work in Syracuse,NY she was an independent curator of international photography exhibitions and had written extensively in the field and I thought she would bring a lot to Cassilhaus. We arranged for her to come 17 months later in the fall of 2015.  A few months before she came she asked if she could bring Charles Guice along.  I was confused.  I didn't know they were a couple-romantically and professionally- and that they were collaborating on a new photo web project called Converging Perspectives. We'd had two collaborating couples before and they were very successful and I adored Charles so I was totally on board.  That is until a certain Norwich Terrier named Wellington entered the picture.

We came to learn that Charles and "Wellie" were inseparable and had traveled together including internationally for 15 years and that Charles wouldn't come to the residency without him. We have a strict no pets policy at Cassilhaus because of our resident felines Jaco and Joni and although Wellie was cat friendly, our two were definitely NOT dog friendly. I tried to find alternate lodging for them in the area so they could still do the residency but nothing was working and Hannah started talking about coming solo. I did one last Hail Mary by sending out a request on my neighborhood listserv to see if anyone was willing to take in two unknown artists and their dog for a month and to my complete shock one of our neighbors, Mike and Diane Doub, who I DIDN"T EVEN KNOW, said they would love to host them.  It was incredible enough that anyone would be so open to taking in total strangers and their dog but even more amazing that they were within walking distance of our house!  The 5 of them bonded like family and Diane basically adopted Wellie.  They are fast friends now.  Although Hannah and Charles became our first non-resident resident artists, I was thrilled to spread our net and share the joy of living with artists with one of our neighbors.

Because I had connected with these guys doing portfolio reviews, I thought it might be interesting for Hannah and Charles to do reviews with photographers in our community rather than the traditional artist talk that many of our residents do.  They graciously agreed to do a whole day of reviews and i gave them a list of artists I thought would benefit from the process and let them select who filled the 8 slots. I asked if our interns could sit in on all of the sessions and get a review themselves and they also agreed to this.

Lisa McCarty showed her new Transcendental Concord Series

Dan Gottlieb showed his new handheld long exposure images.

Rachel Boillot participated via Skype from Tennessee and talked about her new book.

Jim Lee showed some of his amazing and inventive new still life work.

Lori Vrba showed both 2 and 3D work.

Also reviewed were Aaron Canipe, Eric Pickersgill, and David Simonton, as well as our interns Michaela O'Brien and Alyssa Miserendino

 

Charles and Hannah also visited old friends Trevor Schoonmaker and Teka Selman who gave them a private sneak preview of Trevor's new exhibition Reality of My Surroundings at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University.

Since leaving us Hannah has shared the exciting news that she has taken over as the Executive Director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock and she and Charles have moved to the tiny village of Woodstock, NY. We expect to see exciting new things happening as she leads the organization toward their 40th anniversary in 2017.

 

 

 

The Do Good Fund at Cassilhaus

David Simonton was the first to tip me off to this amazing thing called the Do Good Fund some time in 2013. This Southern photography initiative was started by an attorney in Columbus, GA named Alan Rothschild. Alan is on the board of a private foundation and one of the innovative ideas the founder of the foundation implemented was to allow each board member to individually support small or start up charitable initiatives outside of the foundation's traditional giving pattern. Alan's idea was to bring contemporary photography of and about the South to non-traditional audiences in often non-traditional venues. His dream was to bring this vital work to school gymnasiums, community colleges, and regional museums and encourage community based programming around the exhibitions for people who don't frequent major museums. I checked out the work they had collected in a very short period of time and was mightily impressed-I wanted to have the NC debut exhibition at Cassilhaus. 

I think Alan was a bit skeptical the first time I contacted him (crazy guy in NC who has a gallery in his house) and he was also overwhelmed with getting his program off the ground-he is a one man Do Good show and has a full time unrelated law practice.  I gently persisted and in March of 2015 Alan agreed to the exhibition.  I was thrilled.  I immediately enlisted the aid of former Cassilhaus intern Rachel Boillot and Duke MFA|EDA director Tom Rankin to serve as curators for the exhibition and despite their incredibly busy schedules they agreed to the job. I was shooting to have the exhibition up for the Click! Triangle Photography Festival in October 2015. Through much of the late spring and summer Rachel and Tom poured over the collection and made the difficult choices to get a collection of almost 150 pieces down to about 45 that we could fit into the show. There was a good bit of overlap between the artists in our collection and those of the Do Good Fund and we had talked initially about combining work from both collections to make up the exhibition but in the end we decided to keep the Do Good work intact in the upstairs gallery and complementary work by the same artists from the Cassilhaus Collection downstairs in the entry gallery and I think it was a great solution. They developed a beautiful exhibition that they dubbed Tracing the American South: Photographs from the Do Good Fund. Our intern at the time Eric Pickersgill agreed to drive to Columbus in a rental van to pick up all of the work. (Click on images to enlarge)

Alan had found these groovy custom bubble wrap gallery bags that he had made to fit each of the individual pieces so packing was a breeze.  It was super heavy duty plastic and the bubbles don't pop.  I was in serious art envelope envy!!  Working with our current interns Alyssa Miserendino and Michaela O'Brien we got the work spread throughout the gallery so Tom and Rachel could come and lay out the show.

After some significant curatorial deliberation we hung the show. The final checklist is here.

I can't remember a time when we hung a show at the house that I didn't know 90% of the images and 3/4s of the artists. It was disorienting at first and then sort of exhilarating.  Each day I was making new discoveries and falling in love with images. That's what it is supposed to be about right? This is an iPhone panorama of the installation in progress.

Below is one of my favorite pairings in the show. On opposite sides of the gold colored wall, Jerry Siegel's 2007 image Shooter of a young African American women in a Selma Alabama arcade shooting bottles with a rifle and a confederate flag in the background juxtaposed with Charles Moore's 1963 image of young African American civil rights protesters being pummeled by spray from a fire hose in Birmingham Alabama.  The rifle and the fire hose seemed to be trained on each other in this amazingly charged duo.

I fell in love with Susan Worsham's Young Boy Cleaning Church, VA 2011 and had to purchase a print for our collection. One of the many side benefits of doing these exhibitions is meeting and befriending artists included in the show.  I got to know Eliot Dudik, Rylan Steele, and Susan Worsham through this show and also learned of the work of many more photographers previously unknown to me.

The opening was lots of fun as ususal.

Alan Rothschild (far left) came up from Columbus for the opening and made some remarks about the collection. It is inspiring what he is doing for the photography community.

Later in the run of the show we asked the two curators Tom Rankin and Rachel Boillot and two of the represented artists Susan Worsham and Aaron Canipe to do a panel discussion and it was a very lively one.

Tom and Rachel really wanted to do a publication for the exhibition with an interview with Alan and that is not something we have done before for our shows as we have no funding source for them.  One of our wonderful Cassilhaus supporters, Mary Jane Rivers, stepped up and made a generous donation to make the publication possible and artist Aaron Canipe designed it. Thank you Mary Jane for this beautiful document of the exhibition!

The Do Good Fund is getting more and more ambitious with their programming and acquisitions and we were thrilled to be able to showcase the work in North Carolina.  Stay tuned to their website for upcoming exhibitions. Alan signs off all of his emails with

 

Be Good | Do Good

 

 

2nd Annual Cassilhaus Contemporary Curator Camp

Curators don't get many opportunities to compare notes and help each other with exhibitions.  In 2014 our visiting artist Mark Sloan spearheaded the first Cassilhaus Contemporary Curator Camp. We had so much fun and it was so successful I convinced Mark to do it again and we have launched an annual tradition.

16 curators from 4 states in the Southeast convened for the day.  Ellen and I both joined in as junior curators in training and learned a ton.  During the day art loans were brokered, collaborations were explored, and sneak previews of shows that are coming to life now were shared by all. We made some great new friends.

Lisa McCarty's Developer Drawings exhibition was up at Cassilhaus during the conference.  She wears both artist and curator hats and gave us all a tour of the work.

It was a beautiful day and we shared lunch on the porch.

 

In the years that I worked in museums, first as a summer student and eventually as a curator, one of the primary lessons I learned was this:  History is shaped by the people who seek to preserve it. We, of the present, decide what to keep, what to put on display, what to put into storage, and what to discard.

 

--Susanna Kearsley

BELEZA

In 2013 I was invited by Ann Ehringhaus, one of our previous Cassilhaus AIRs, to be on the photo crew for the annual Ocrafolk Festival on Ocracoke Island, NC.  I was to photograph the bands on the various stages throughout the island and it was my first time at the festival.  It was love at first chord.  I got some great photos and made some great new friends.  I also discovered Beleza-a Brazilian/American duo playing samba, funk, soul, blues, bossa, jazz and Spanish flamenco. Beleza is Madeline and Humberto "Berto" Sales.  Ellen and I looked at each other and said "ya know we haven't had a musical artist yet.." It took a while to make the stars align but Beleza joined us in July and August of 2015.

 

It was their first residency and they didn't quite know what to expect.  The project they wanted to work on was a new youth oriented record. They had lots of creative space here and it was an incredible joy for us to hear live music coming down the hall every day.  They were very focused but always left time for fun and sharing.  We had a GREAT time with them. 

They jumped in to help me make sticky buns one evening.

Dinner out with amazing artist Damian Stamer.

 

Summer fun in Ellen's ELF.

We are incredibly excited that "Just for Fun" was born here and was just released.  Take a listen and pick up a copy. In a former lifetime I used to run a recording studio and it was pretty hilarious to see Berto do with an iPad what used to take me a room full of equipment to do.  They were working on demos for the tunes they ultimately recorded in the studio in Charlottesville.

 

They couldn't resist doing a little gardening while they were here and left us some beautiful additions to the garden!

Most of our visiting artists give an artist talk.  Beleza gave a PERFORMANCE. We can seat about 50 at our events and almost all of our programs eventually "sell" out.  I wasn't prepared, however, for getting 120 RSVPs in 48 hours after sending the invitation-particularly from a duo almost completely unknown in the Triangle. My theory is that many folks are intimidated to come to an artist talk because they think they need some kind of specialized knowledge to appreciate the talk but everyone feels like they can appreciate new music.  After a momentary panic about pissing a bunch of people off or organizing another venue, Madeline and Berto graciously agreed to do a second show and we had two standing room sets. I was swept off my feet-pure magic.  Their chemistry was so electric and intimate I was almost a little uncomfortable to be so close to it. Click on these stills and videos to make them full screen.

 

 

Berto had this cool foot pedal activated looping device he affectionately calls Loopita and Madeline does live vocal looping on this song.

It's pretty quiet down the hall now.  Madeline and Berto thanks for filling our lives and home with music, at least for a little while and until you return.

 

 E aí, beleza?

Hey, what‘s up?

Beleza, which literally means beauty, nowadays has a much wider meaning. Saying beleza means things are going fine.

The expression is mostly used by young people and is very informal. It also has shorter versions like: Beleza? or even Belê?

Here are some ways to reply

1. Beleza 2. Tudo bem 3. Mais ou menos 4. Tranquilo

 

 from gringoes.com

 

 

 

PRIVATE PORTALS

Sheila Pree Bright  Untitled #20 from Suburbia  2005

After our Masks & Mirrors exhibition, Ellen and I decided we wanted to do a show featuring the female artists in our collection. It raised the obvious question of whether we would do a show featuring the male artists in our collection and other gender bias issues but at the end of the day we decided the egregious under-representation of women artists in the art world in general warranted a celebration of their work in the Cassilhaus Collection. We have been collecting for 15 years and we wanted to celebrate that anniversary as well. Ellen suggested that we curate it together, our first co-curation, and Private Portals: The Cassilhaus Collection Celebrates 15 Years Discovering Girl Power was born.  Girl Power references the Girl Power Room which is the project gallery at the far East end of the Gallery.  We had a show of incredibly powerful female portraits in the space back in 2010 and someone came through and said "wow I can just feel the girl power in here" and the name stuck.  The exhibition explored various interpretations of transition, passage, private space, and entry points into other worlds and included 53 works by 46 artists. A complete checklist can be downloaded here-- Private Portals Checklist Final.

 

The inimitable Neil Patterson, a true gentleman and scholar, lends a hand during installation of the show. Who looks THIS GOOD during install????

Jaco and Joni lend a paw or two but mostly make painting challenging.

 

One of the biggest buzzes of the show was generated by a new piece that Ellen discovered recently by Welsh artist Helen Sear called Inside the View #17. In this series Sear, the 2015 Welsh delegate to the Venice Biennale, superimposes portrait and landscape images in PhotoShop and then uses a stylus tool to selectively eliminate parts of one of the images in varying proportions across the entire image.

Cheryle St. Onge   Untitled from Natural Findings Series  2012

Anne Schwalbe   Falten   2009

The opening as usual was a smash.

 

We had a sister show to Private Portals in the Girl Power Room by Durham NC based artist Lisa McCarty called Developer Drawings.  The series Developer Drawings is an experiment to make photographs using only light and the varying developers contained in Polaroid and Impossible Project Instant film. Rather than expose the instant film with a camera, McCarty tests the parameters of the materials themselves by using the developer encased in the frame of every print to compose an image. As she manipulates the developer under the plastic skin of the print surface, the existing light triggers reactions which change the color and the texture of the developer and film emulsion below it. Every drawing records a new expression of the photographic material and the agency of light, demonstrating that there is already a latent image inside of each instant film print, waiting to be released.

Lisa commandeered three of our flat file drawers in the Girl Power Room to do expansive layouts of pieces in the series.  She showed several groupings of 8 "drawings" in a single frame together in the show, representing a pack of instant film.  I asked her if I could make my own grouping of 8 from one of the flat file drawers and this is what I came up with and now we have this grouping framed up in our collection. Below is a close-up of one of the 8.

 

During the run of the show Lisa gave an artist talk on her work. She is a great speaker and it greatly increased my understanding and appreciation of the work.

 

 

A huge amount of work goes into putting these shows together and even though a fair number of people get to see them during their run it always pains me to take them down and disperse them.  I hit upon the idea of "traveling" Private Portals, minus the McCarty exhibition, to my office, KONTEK Systems, in Downtown Durham where it could be on display for our staff and also for the monthly 3rd Friday Art Walks in Durham. We had to make some changes and reduce the size of the show to accommodate the space but it was exciting to see new pairings and juxtapositions and it was a big hit on the artwalk.  I think we will more actively curate this space now and make even more active use of our collection.

 

Artists Heather Gordon, Tama Hochbaum, and Lori Vrba at the opening with my wife Ellen Cassilly and Cassilhaus artist in residence Olivia Parker.

 

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

--Audre Lorde

 

 

Wang Ramirez ADF Party #7

 

Photo Courtesy Wang Ramirez

It's New Year's Resolution time and no better time to catch up on a whole bunch of overdue blog posts of past goings on at Cassilhaus.  I've said it before but one of our favorite nights of the year is our annual tradition of hosting an American Dance Festival post-performance dinner party for one of the dance companies.  July 2015 was our 7th and we have had a different company each year. This year it was the Wang Ramirez company. Honji Wang, German born of Korean parents and Sébastien Ramirez, French Born of Spanish parents, gave a magical performance called Monchichi (2011) that seemed to defy the laws of gravity.

Photo Courtesy Wang Ramirez

We fell in love immediately after having them for dinner at the house.

We joined them again in downtown Durham for the after party after their performance the following night.

 

I have it on good authority that Wang Ramirez have been invited back for this years festival and we will get to see another of their amazing dance pieces. We are very hopeful that they can stay with us during their time here .

 

 

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

DAVID PACE

I met David Pace in 2014 when I was observing a portfolio review at Fotofest Houston. Sometimes I just know immediately that I want to invite someone to the Cassilhaus residency and I asked him that same day. Fourteen months later he was on our doorstep.  I liked David and the work he was doing in Burkina Faso so much. He was showing me the Karaba brick quarry and Friday Night Dance work that day.

 

He showed our community much more of that work during his standing room only artist's talk.

We had our usual lively crowd who got to tour the Private Portals exhibition (post coming soon!) that was up during David's stay with us.

Ron and Iris

George and Lisa

Marge and Holly

Rachel

Anne, Gesche, and David

We make a point of trying to connect our visiting artist with scholars and resources to help with the projects they want to work on while in residence.  I have to confess I thought I had met my match at the prospect of finding someone in our area working on Francophone West African contemporary photography. Thanks to the amazing Naomi Nelson at the Rubenstein Special Collections Library at Duke, we were able to connect David with not one but three scholars at Duke and UNC with overlapping research interests. The icing on the cake was finding a graduate student from Burkina Faso that was able to meet David and come to his talk. Apparently there is a very small cadre of US scholars working in Burkina and David tapped into an amazing network here. Who knew? Naomi apparently!

JOHN MILTON WAS MISTAKEN

Eszter Szablyar and Tamas Dezso

 

Awhile back I asked artist-in-residence alums from the last few years to reflect on their time here at Cassilhaus now that the residency was in their rear view mirror.  I just got this deeply touching response from Eszter and Tamas who visited from Hungary in June of 2014 and I had to share it.  We developed such a wonderful bond of friendship while they were here and are excited to visit them in Budapest next year. We are also thrilled that the book that Tamas and Eszter worked on during their time here, Notes for an Epilogue, will be released by noted photo publisher Hatje Cantz in September.

 

"John Milton was mistaken. Paradise is not lost, at least it still exists in the form of a divine house and an enchanted forest in Chapel Hill, NC. Instead of Adam and Eve, it is Frank and Ellen who run this captivating space, which is full of bird songs. They care for the poppies, as well as a shady fig tree – surely an obligatory prerequisite for Paradise. They also fill the hummingbird feeder and fill the exhibition space with art, inviting inspiring artists to give presentations, read, make music, and offer an account of their artistic journeys. Absolute tranquillity, undisturbed silence, and trees reaching to the skies provided a stimulating background for working creatively in the artists’ studio designed by Ellen to be breathtakingly elegant and larger than life. And when after the longish working hours we desired some honest, clever, and cheerful conversation, on the other side of the door we always found two extraordinarily good people, Ellen and Frank, in the company of two playful feline characters, Jaco and Joni. It was an exceptional adventure to experience the curiosity, openness, and helpfulness of Ellen and Frank – and an honour to immediately gain their friendship. With Cassilhaus a new reckonning of time began in our lives. Our experiences gained and the time spent there created an invisible bond with our new Cassilhaus friends"

Thank you so much Eszter and Tamas for bringing your creativity, joy, and love into our home.  It was a transformative experience for us as well.

CAROLYN DRAKE

For the record I did not PhotoShop in the halo.  it is a reflection of Marie Navarre's Seeing the Song across the room. I met Carolyn Drake in 2013 when we were on a photo panel together at the Ackland Art Museum. I liked her and her work immediately. She had been based in Istanbul and working on two stunning projects in Asia which yielded artists books.

Almost immediately after meeting we invited her to the residency but the stars did not align for her to come until April of this year. She had clearly thought a lot about making the most of her time here and I'd never experienced one of our visiting artists so quick out of the starting gate. On like the second day I asked if she would be interested in going for a swim and she had already swum both days here and finagled a free membership at a great swim club. She wanted to work on a project surrounding coal ash as Duke Energy had recently had a massive spill near here and I asked her if I could set up meetings with chemistry/toxicology guys at Duke but she was already on their calendars. No grass growing underneath Carolyn Drake. She had an idea that she would like to take landscapes and process the prints somehow incorporating the coal ash material.  She wanted to learn about the chemistry of the material but it turned out to be surprisingly hard to get the material itself in an undiluted form.

Carolyn with husband and sometimes assistant Andres hunting for coal ash sludge.

 

When it came time for Carolyn to do her artist talk I asked her for some images for the invitation and she sent me this from an orphanage in Ukraine and it knocked me out.

She hadn't ever printed it and Ellen and I were right in the middle of curating our next show called Private Portals featuring women artists in our collection and I really wanted to include it in the show and we were only weeks from the opening.  Carolyn was a trooper.  We found her a great local printer and she printed it at various scales to see what worked and we quickly settled on a 16x20 and then there were quite a few iterations to get the skin tone and background perfect.  We bought the print and I framed it in the basement a day before it needed to be on the wall.

Each artist who stays with us inevitably overlaps with things on our schedule unrelated to their residency and we usually ask them along for the ride.  Carolyn was here during my company KONTEK Systems' Night at the Bulls annual customer appreciation event at the Durham Bulls Ballpark (2014 event shown). Baseball didn't engage her very long and she was off with her camera in the hood.

Her time was over in a flash.  We got to meet her husband Andres Gonzales, also an amazing photographer, when he came to assist one weekend. On their way out of town they scored a major cache of coal ash.  We know we haven't heard the end of this story.

 

 

 

 

 

Masks and Mirrors

( a reminder again if you are getting this blog via email subscription it will display much better if you go to the blog on the web here.)

 

So my friend Jeanette, the ED of RCWMS in Durham, called to ask if we would be interested in doing an exhibition of the work of three local women artists in honor of Swan Day.  My first question, of course, was what is Swan Day. It stands for Support Women Artists Now and it is an annual international celebration of women in the arts. What's not to love right?  I knew two of the artists, Mary Jane Rivers and Bryant Holsenbeck, well and liked their work and soon knew Marcy Litle and her wonderful work as well. Two painters and a sculptor/installation artist. The Masks and Mirrors exhibition was born.

We had a ton of wonderful volunteer help to hang the show.

 

The opening was a complete smash

Mary Jane's partner Grace with her daughter, grand daughter, and great grand daughter. 4 generations at one opening!

 

I wasn't prepared for the incredible amount and range of programming they planned and avalanche of interest there was in this show.

I love a first at Cassilhaus and we got a handful. For starters it was our first show of painting.  Also Cassilhaus doesn't have public hours and we experimented for the first time with weekly open-to-the- public daytime docent hours in addition to five evening programs including the opening, readings, an artist talk and musical performances. We had extraordinary audiences with many coming to Cassilhaus for the first time.

Randa McNamara brought down the house.

All three artists gave inspiring artist talks. We had wonderful readings which I forgot to photograph :(

Alison Weiner, Mary Capucilli, and friends gave a fantastic musical goodbye at the closing event.

Artist Marcy Litle

Artist Bryant Holsenbeck (in center making noise)

And Mary Jane loved it all.  It was an incredibly beautiful show. (Click to enlarge)

 

The show got me thinking about representation of women in the art world.  The Guerrilla Girls have long documented the depressing statistics on this front. It made me take a look at our own collection and the percentage of women represented and although we are at a respectable 40% we are still not at parity. It inspired us to do the next show as a showcase of the women artists in our own collection.  Stay tuned for a post on the Private Portals show.

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.

 

ALDWYTH WINS VERNER AWARD

We are thrilled to report that Aldwyth, previous Cassilhaus Artist in Residence, is the recipient of the 2015 Elizabeth O'Neill Verner Award in the individual artist category.  The award is the highest award given in the arts in South Carolina (frequently called the Governor’s Award for the Arts, as it is presented by the governor). Details here. Congratulations Aldwyth!  Just a reminder to those who read these posts via email blasts that the best way to view the blog and get proper formatting and video links is to go to the blog itself at http://www.cassilhaus.typepad.com/

 

BEVERLY PENN

About 7 or 8 years ago I saw an exhibition of the work of Beverly Penn at the Lisa Sette Gallery in Arizona and it knocked me out.  As primarily a photo person it was exciting to get completely energized by another medium and to learn about Beverly's amazing process of casting impossibly detailed replicas of real plants in bronze (click any image to enlarge.)

The work was out of my price range and I was still in the old house and didn't have any room for it anyway so it got filed away in the "amazing artists that I will just have to appreciate in my minds eye" file. Fast forward to 2014. Lisa was moving her gallery from Scottsdale to Phoenix and the subject of Beverly's work came up in conversation and her piece that Ellen and I had been particularly drawn to called Twin was still available. We now had a spectacular location for it in the new house and the moving sale gave us a bit of a discount which helped us stretch our budget and so we decided to take the plunge.  We had to wait a few more months as the piece was installed in an exhibition in California but Cassilhaus was going to be the forever home of this amazing piece.

Twin, from Beverly's Weeds series, takes its name from two coexisting (near her home in Austin Texas) invasive species-thistle and hydrilla.  The piece is 72"x72"x15" and came to us as 31 individual pieces in 5 giant boxes. We decided to place it on the large wall in our main stairwell because you could view it from 3 sides including the sundeck, we didn't need to worry about exposure to the sun, and you could get a very close view of the piece but still be far enough away so you wouldn't accidentally brush against its very sharp edges. Installation was a fascinating and weekend long process with very detailed instructions.  A couple of places in the instructions it said "DO NOT PROCEED ANY FURTHER UNTIL THE ARTIST IS PRESENT TO ASSIST." We called Beverly and she talked us through it.  The piece came with a large paper template which we taped to the wall at the installation location and drilled about 100 holes in the wall per the marks on the template. We were instructed to mark each hole we drilled with a colored check mark so we would be sure not to miss any.  Because the piece had been installed multiple times before there were about 7 sets of check marks in all different colors.  This video from the Austin Art Museum of Beverly installing her piece Genius Loci gives you a glimpse of the process.

 

Ellen and I were pretty quick studies

The pieces were individually numbered and needed to be installed in numeric order as they sometimes intertwined with each other.  The template indicated the orientation of each piece and the drill bits were precisely sized so that the metal spikes on each piece tightly fit into the drywall holes.

Here we are getting to the pieces that have both thistle and the heavier hydrilla which form the center of the piece.

 

The large center piece, unlike all of the other pieces wrapped in bubble wrap, was shipped surrounded by loose styrofoam peanuts and it took Ellen nearly 45 minutes to get all of them away from the sharp sculpture elements using a metal kabob stick.

This is NOT a light piece of metal!

Twin looks great next to Patrick Dougherty's Walkabout.

We were a little bit freaked out that we found 3 small segments of the piece that had broken off in shipping.  Beverly casts these pieces in 4-5 inch lengths and welds them together so it was not too surprising.  We called her and as luck would have it she was coming to North Carolina in a few months to give a talk at ECU at a metals conference and she said she could come and make a repair on site! Thanks to the generous lending of an acetylene torch by our friends at Jewelsmith, Beverly was able to bring everything else she needed to do the repair and did it right in our carport.

She used high resolution photographs of the piece to make sure she got the pieces back in exactly the right spots.

She adds a patina to give the piece an even more lifelike appearance. In less than an hour the piece was back together and good as new.

While she was coming all this way we convinced her to stay with us for a few days (part of our evil plan to get her to come back as an artist in residence). She agreed to do an artist talk the evening she did the repair and we are all pretty blown away by the technical and philosophical underpinnings of the work.

While we didn't record the talk, you can good a good glimpse of her process in this recording from a talk at the Grace Museum.  It includes her talking about the fabrication of our piece Twin.

 

 

Thank you Beverly for expanding our world and bringing so much beauty to it.

 

 

BRYAN SCHUTMAAT

Our final visiting artist for 2014 was the amazing Texas based photographer and all around great human Bryan Schutmaat. He got onto my radar sometime in 2013 when I got an excited call from my friend David Simonton asking me if I knew about Grays the Mountain Sends, Bryan's wonderful series of the American West. I didn't but you have to pay attention when David gets that animated!  It didn't take me long to get excited too.  Apparently other people got the memo before I did as he had recently won the Aperture Portfolio Prize, The CENTER (Sante Fe) Prize, the Daylight Photo Award, and had lit up the photo blogs.

I contacted him about purchasing a print of my favorite image in the series (Derek) and asked him if he would come to the residency and I was thrilled that he accepted.

Derek, Big Timber, Montana, 2011

 

His limited edition book of the series on Silas Finch sold out before it was released and had already popped up on resale sites.  He said when he came he would be working on the second edition of the book (only slightly modified from the first) and a companion side-car publication called Islands of the Blest. The latter is a wonderful compilation of public domain photographs of the American West by a wide range of photographers over a 100 year period. I was moved by the beautiful poem by Michael McGriff that Bryan chose for the book.

 

"Letter Sewn into a Pantcuff of Smoke"

I’ll come back to you
in the hour of basalt and copper,
back like floodwater pressing its
shoulder against the ribs of the valley.

When I rub bear fat into my boots
a star disappears and the bones in my hand
become a set of gears
bringing electricity to this canyon
of burnt oil and jagged creeks.

When I say your name
the meridian goes bright
as the bit in a blind horse’s mouth.
When I say your name
a bucket of sparks empties into the river
and the night sky is streaked through
with charred snags and shale.

Each night a new ghost
lays out a single crosstie
and a farrier’s hammer
falls through the well shaft of my dream.
I am all steam polish and cable hum,
all snowdrifts clinging
to the north side of the ridge.

I turn coal into motion.
I lie flat on my stomach and drink
from the runoff like a mountain boomer.
I look into a wall of flame
and hear the songs of a trestle.

A buzzard throws down
the ace of spades
and I run a grease bead
across the axle of the moon
and make it spin.

The horizon opens its mouth
and strikes a match against its dry tooth
and I write this letter for you
and sew it into a pantcuff made of smoke
from these islands of the blest.

—Michael McGriff

It was fascinating to see Bryan in action. It is such a treat to be able to get a back stage tour of an artist's process.  We were able to connect him to the Archive of Documentary Arts at the Rubenstein Special Collection Library at Duke University for his research for Blest. Lisa McCarty, our former Cassilhaus intern, is now the curator there. He found a good amount of material for the book in the archive.

David and Bryan geeking out on negatives.

Bryan gave a talk when he was here and we had a great crowd.

Just before he left I was shooting pictures of Bryan with my iPhone and it went it to this weird white out mode but I like what I got.

 

 

About 3 months after Bryan left, Ellen and I were headed to LA with a stop in Dallas and just as we walk off the plane who do we see but Bryan coming toward us looking exhausted and headed back to Austin after a whirlwind world tour shooting a bunch of images including one of the covers for Time's Person of the Year issue about the Ebola Fighters.

 

What are the chances?  We managed to squeeze in a dinner and catch up between flights. Small wonderful world.

(definitely not boring people)

 

It's always a toss up on who has the most fun during these residencies, Ellen and I or the artist. Thanks for everything Bryan.

 

ANALOG

 

At the AIPAD fair in April 2014 I stumbled upon a portfolio at Terry Etherton's booth called Celebrating the Negative by photographer John Loengard. It was a series of 18 gelatin silver prints of the NEGATIVES of iconic photographs. It is a bit ironic that so much attention has been paid these celebrated photographs and almost no attention is given the essential element to all of them.  Loengard tracked down these negatives either in major archives or from the photographers estate or family.  He photographed them being held either by the photographer, a family member, himself, or an archivist. I have to say I think I would be terrified to hold one of them-somehow they seem even more precious than the prints.

I immediately thought about doing a show at Cassilhaus and asked Terry if there was a framed set of the images of the portfolio and he turned me onto a wonderful organization called Curatorial Assistance in Pasedena that had a non-profit arm that provided a full catalog of traveling exhibitions for hire and Celebrating the Negative was amongst them.  Terry organized for me to only have to pay for freight to get the show here-the first time Cassilhaus has ever mounted a touring exhbition. The intricacies of art shipping/insurance/condition reports etc. were eye openers and added a lot of time to the preshow-I may stick with local exhibitions! He also sent along another copy of the portofolio so people could see and handle the prints themselves.  There is a book by the same name that accompanies the portfolio.

At the same AIPAD fair I discovered a series called Developer Trays by a Brooklyn based photographer named John Cyr. Photographs of famous photographers' developer trays would seem a bit of a tough sell-until you the see the work.  Just stunning and offering a unique perspective on the history of photography and each photographer's individual work style.

Neil Selkirk's Developer Tray

Sally Mann's Developer Tray

 

I thought this work would be great paired with the Loengard work and the ANALOG show, celebrating traditional film and analog photography, was born. In a moment of fancy I decided to ice the cake and convert our laundry room (inside the main gallery) into a fully working darkroom!  David Simonton and Roylee Duvall lent equipment and ephemera from their darkrooms and David staged the room to such detail it was like walking into a time machine. He had empty film cartons taped to the wall with exposure notes, real negatives in the enlarger and clothes line, post cards of photographs that inspired him taped to the walls, a complete library of technical photo texts including Ansel Adams' darkroom guides, beakers and chemicals, process trays (a developer tray of course!) and tongs, dodging and burning tools, safe lights, photo paper, a print washer, and last but not least a cassette boom box with a brilliant and highly curated selection of cassettes.

David at work

The laundry room is right between the main part of the gallery where the Loengard work hung and the project gallery (aka girl power room) where we had the Cyr work so I used the darkroom for signage for the Developer Tray exhibition.  I had John Cyr make original B&W prints of the words "John", "Cyr", "Develper", and "Trays" and hung two of them on the clothesline and put two in the process trays.  David even supplied me with chemicals to give that authentic darkroom smell.

 

The exhibition from Curatorial Assistance included the 18 framed images of the negatives plus a framed text panel for each with historical and descriptive information about the image. I thought it would be instructive to have at least one of the actual positives of the images and again Terry Etherton came through by loaning me a vintage GSP of Harry Callahan's Aix-en-Provence 1958 which shows what a magician Callahan was in the darkroom. The negative had all kinds of crazy reflections in the background and none of them appear in the print.

During the run of the show we flew John Cyr down to give an artist talk about his work and hear a few of his fascinating stories of capturing these images.  Contrary to what I assumed-that he just asked photographers to send him their unused trays to photograph-he traveled around the country to photograph them at the photographers' studios as most of them are still in daily use. Each story was as unique as the patina on the trays.

 

I don't think much about the digital world...because I am in the analog world! 

 

William Eggelston

 

 

Thomas Sayre at Cassilhaus

We have admired Thomas Sayre's magnificent work for a very long time but never imagined we would be lucky enough to have one of his pieces here at the house.  After doing small commissions with Patrick Dougherty and Mayme Kratz we became more comfortable with the idea of doing artist commissions and Thomas had come back on our radar in a big way as we followed the making of a new documentary about his work called Earthcaster. We went to see a number of his amazing pieces at the Finkel Garden and fell in love with Marty and Alan Finkel and the wonderful work that Thomas made for them.  They shared their stories of a rich history working with Thomas on custom pieces for their garden and we were hooked.

We had Thomas out to Cassilhaus early in 2013 to start a conversation and talked about a number of locations for a piece. 

He spent a good bit of time walking the land and talking with us. He was in the middle of several extremely large commissions and these often allow him opportunities to try out new ideas which may prove fruitful for smaller commissions with small budgets :) He wrote late in 2013:

I have done some musings about the possibilities for a piece at your place in recent weeks. As I mentioned to both of you, I have been literally playing in the mud as a variant of earthcasting and am stimulated by the results. I am attaching several photographs of a piece I did recently as part of an international project that involved making a mold out of mud, imposing a circular groove or depression in the mold and then drying the mold to produce a series of wonderful cracks which I was able to capture in the casting.

There is something about the water below your house, the mud which is inevitably in its bottom, and the land itself which water rushes over (given its steepness) which somehow seems resonant. I have thought of some sort of map of the river, or the land, or the tree placement within the land and letting the map dry and crack and be, in a way, reclaimed by the natural event of shrinking mud.

We latched onto the idea of a piece that represented New Hope Creek below our house and  made several visits to Thomas' studio to see prototypes.

Thomas was working with a topo map of the land below us.  He was making forms filled with mud, working the mud, and then allowing it to harden and crack to form a mold which he then used to cast our pieces.

Thomas sent Blaine and Sean over to start the installation before joining later in the day. We mocked up the placement first so we would decide on a left/right location.  The piece was being installed over top of our creeping fig and we are hopeful that it will find its way around it and continue to fill the carport retaining wall.

Thomas doesn't have a name for the piece yet but I am sure that will come as we all live with it.  It is the first thing we see when we walk out of the house and it brings the stream up the hill to us. Thank you Thomas for so beautifully capturing our "place" in your work.

 

 

Stairway to Kitty Heaven

So Jaco and Joni had been driving us crazy to go outside and we really are adamant that they can't be outdoor kitties because of the hawks and coyotes in the adjacent woods so we have taken to leaving them out on the screened porch which they love. We have talked for a while about figuring out a way to put a cat door out to the porch but the porch is directly adjacent to a solid wall of kitchen cabinets. 

Ellen had the idea of cutting a hole in the back of one of the base cabinet drawers and then penetrating the stucco wall on the other side and just leaving the drawer open when we wanted them to have access to the porch but I was pretty dead set against cutting the stucco wall. We took to letting them go through the kitchen window by jumping up on the counter and then out to the chair storage unit but a) we were not wild about them being on the counter (particularly Ellen!) and b) when winter came we didn't want to leave the window open for them. I got to thinking about ways to get them passage to the porch and I hit upon the idea of coming through the ceiling. In an earlier post I detailed a cat spiral staircase project we did in the dining room that they love and spend alot of time on. A quick look at the architectural plans led to a location in our master bedroom closet that was precisely over the most logical spot for the cats to descend another spiral stair-simple enough in theory.

I'm in general pretty open to wild ideas but even I got a bit into this project and had a "what was I thinking" moment. It was truly a massive undertaking. Ellen and I engaged our dear friend James again who helped us with the last porch project and we dove in.  After pulling up the carpet in the closet we drilled a test hole in the floor and hit steel (which we knew was near our drilling location but not exactly where)-Yikes-a structural bracing member. 

We had to move our planned penetration location West which meant the cats might have to do a little inside-the-floor-joists travel to get to the hole in the ceiling of the porch.  And our house has no normal interstitial space-it is about two feet thick with large trusses at that point and 18" of dense pack celluslose insulation. We cut the floor and filled two gigantic contractor trash bags with insulation.

We wanted to maintain the thermal barrier as much as possible so we built a box in the truss layer that we could tightly pack all around with insulation.  With all the trapezoids in the house it seemed fitting that the box turned out to have to be trapezoidal to fit within the trusses and avoid the steel.

Over a period of three days we cut and trimmmed out the hole in the cedar ceiling of the porch, built and painted the inter-floor box, and fabricated a heavily insulated upper box for the cats to come up into that had a swinging insulated cat door. James has just finished architecture school so we had two architecture grads working on the design of these boxes. We had to adapt as we went to make it fit with the existing closet constraints.  After the first two days we made the hole in the floor signficantly larger after watching the cats come through.  They were great beta testers for all aspects of the project (provided there were snacks at their destination.)

I did quite a bit of research on the cat door itself-who knew there were so many options?  Settled on this one from Freedom Pet Pass.  It seemed the best balance of cost, build quality, and insulative effectiveness and they offered a plexiglass blocking panel when we don't want the cats to go out at all.

We weren't entirely sure that Jaco and Joni would take to this scheme.  After we assembled the spiral stair case below we put them at the bottom and they seemed to want to turn the wrong way.  We quickly figured out that we had configured it with a counter clockwise spiral and the existing one in the dining room was clockwise so we reconfigured it and poof they were zooming up and down.

We had to work finding the precise distance from the ceiling for the highest platform but once we found it they gingerly made their way up through the hole and the steps inside the inner box and up to the floor of the closet.

After we got the upper box in place we realize it would be pitch black when they were making the rather contorted transition to the stair below so I found some great battery operated motion sensor lights called Mr. Beams that work like a dream.  Now whenever they come from either above or below the light comes on as soon as they get near the holes. 

They both go back and forth seamlessly now and I have to say the project is an unqualified success and we have two very happy kitties. Some of us were tired when we finished too.

How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven. - Robert A. Heinlein

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

Penland: An Expansive Vision

I am behind as usual on my posts.  Most of you know Penland, the world class crafts school in western North Carolina.  But you may not know the depth and breadth of their photography program. For 4 decades they have been teaching the newest of the new along side the most arcane of historical and alternative processes and everything in between and have influenced countless photographers.  Ellen and I were approached by director Jean McLaughlin about supporting a planned new state-of-the-art photography studio building that will extend Penland's photography legacy into the next century.

We had such success with the PhotObama auction here that we thought a photography auction would be a great and fun way to raise funds for the project.  Enough time had passed too that we forgot how much work it was!

35 amazing photographers with history and ties to Penland donated their work and along with event sponsorships we raised and incredible $34,500 in a single afternoon for the new building. You can download a complete checklist here.

Photographer David Spear discussing his donation to the exhibition and auction. David's piece Juana Paloma ignited the hottest bidding war of the afternoon selling for well over estimate.

Another hot property during the auction (and during absentee advance bidding) was MJ Sharp's The Persistence of Sea Foam.

The amazing (and stylish!) Gary Phillips with Weaver Street Realty reprised his role and donated his services as auctioneer and kept the crowd bidding. 

Lee Moore donated special flower arrangements.

Our amazing intern (and now Duke MFA grad) Rachel Boillot (center with boots) helped me curate and hang the show, did the checklist, and everything else from patching and painting walls to matting and framing donations.

David Summer (left) with The Framer's Corner in Carrboro saved my butt on more than one occassion with emergency framing issues AND donated gift certificates as incentives for higher bidders. 

Jennings Brody with Parker and Otis donated all of the delicious food.

Penland's Robin Dreyer spoke to various groups to highlight the spectacular work on auction and Penland had a virtual army of helpers on hand on auction day and leading up to the event to make things run like a Swiss watch.

 

We are so grateful to all of the talented artists who donated their time and work to ensure the success of the auction and the future of Penland's photography program.

Glimpse Closing/Pecchio-Hilliard Talk

It's always hard to see a show come down when you've been living with it for months, so my solution was to have a closing party for the Glimpse Exhibition.  I wanted to honor the photographers represented in the show and 6 of them--Pam Pecchio, David Hilliard, Burk Uzzle, Lisa McCarty, MJ Sharp, and Elizabeth Matheson were on hand to celebrate in person.  I asked Pam and David if they would give a joint artist talk about their current work.  What I didn't know when I asked them was that Pam was David's teaching assistant at Yale where they both got their MFA and that they hadn't seen each other in 15 years!! It was a wonderful reunion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The room was thick with photographers!

 

 David talked about his early influences

and spoke at length about working with his Dad and their relationship.

Pam introduced a new body of work involving photographing, printing, cutting, collaging, and then rephotographing.

Joni started to dip into the vino.

Jeff Whetstone, David, Anna Walker Skillman (Director of Jackson Fine Art, David's Atlanta gallery), and Pam

It was a spectacular afternoon filled with rich photography and a wonderful crowd.

 

Chris McCaw

Our final resident artist for 2013 was San Francisco based photorapher Chris McCaw.

He has made an enormous splash in the photography world recently with his Sunburn series. This series employs a fundamentally new photographic process of his design where expired photographic PAPER (rather than film) is exposed in large format vintage cameras with large optics and exposures up to 24 hours to produce unique paper negatives where the arc of the sun is physically burned into the paper. Do take the opportunity to read Chris's full explanation of his process on his site and see some of the amazing images like the one below in the series.

He has taken this notion to quite a large scale as you can see from some of his homemade cameras!

We really enjoyed meeting Chris' girlfriend Rachel, also an artist, who had just come from an opening in Houston and spent a few days with us at the beginning of Chris' stay.  We weren't sure we were going to be able to get her out of the Durham Scrap Exchange.   She quickly filled up a full sized shopping cart for her next body of work. We cracked open our first bottle of Carolina CatDaddy Moonshine, a gift from our photographer friend David Simonton.

 

When we invite artists to Cassilhaus we encourage them to take on an ambitious project, maybe one outside of their comfort zone, to work on during their time here.  We offer to connect them to resources and scholars in the area that might help them realize the project. There has been no better example of this type of collaboration than with the project Chris proposed. He had purchased a Cirkut camera from the early 1900s on eBay and wanted to modify it and motorize it to track the sun automatically for 24 hours or longer taking into account the earth's rotation.

He didn't have expertise in electronics, motors, or astronomy and was looking for some help. I had no knowledge in these areas either but after a few dead ends I scanned the faculty website for the UNC Department of Physics and Astronomy and sent a cold email to the chair of the department, Dr. Christopher Clemens, whose bio said his research interests included astronomoical instrumentation.

To my complete astonishment, Chris (the astronomer) not only responded but was enthusiastic about helping us with the project!  His response was basically, "what Chris proposes is likely impossible.  When do we get started?" Within two months of this initial contact Dr. Clemens was teaching a for credit seminar class in his department with graduate and undergraduate students specifically to develop Chris' camera.  We were all flabbergasted at how all in he was. Ellen and I visited the class one day.  These kids were ridiculously smart.

Chris M went from hoping to start a conversation about how to approach the project to the prospect of having a working prototype before he even arrived! He sent the camera in advance and when he got here he started working with the students to work through issues with the hardware and software. What a difference it makes to work on an actual real problem where you can see the results both good and bad immediately after you have tried something.

He had also sent his monograph on the Sundburn series along for the students which added another amazing aspect of the collaboration as these students had little or no exposure to the world of fine art photography.  They were totally energized by his work.

While software glitches and an unusually long run of bad weather (Chris can only shoot when the sun is shining!) in Chapel Hill kept him from being able to fully utilize the camera while he was here, the experience was life changing for the students and a major step forward on the project for Chris.  We are incredibly grateful to both Chrises for this singular collaboration.

Chris M was so generous with his time while he was here.  He gave an artist talk at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and also gave informal presentations about his work to student groups.

Chris drove here from San Francisco in his amazing tricked out van--the same van he drove all the way to the arctic circle.  It has bedroom, kitchen, dining room, living room, storage room and dark room all in one!

While he was here he was also experimenting with new variations on the Sunburn technique including this crazy rig with 63 50mm SLR lenses mounted on a board.  Note he can change the size of the image by selectively installing lens caps!

We ask each of our visiting artists to leave their "mark" on the inside of a closet door in the artist's apartment.  It is a very special "wall" of rememberance. We have had some fantastic offerings. We were pretty curious about what Chris was going to come up with and the answer came when he called to ask if he could take the door off its hinges.  But first he had to conjure the Sun God.

Then he went to work.

There is still a little scent of burnt paint in the room.

Ellen and I were just in San Francisco over the holidays and we rung up Chris to see if we could visit.  He was, of course, out with the van on the stunning coast near Pacifica doing a multi-hour exposure.  It was great to see him at work in his home environment. Can't wait to see the finished product.  Thank you Chris for a fantastic adventure.

 

 

Addendum 4pm 1/3/14:  This just in from the Mojave Desert

"Rachel and I just got back from 5 days in the Mojave using the cirkut camera!
There is a giant learning curve and many technical hurdles to tackle, but in short...it works!"

 

A Tree Grows at Cassilhaus

I've already done some bragging on our new kittens Joni and Jaco who turned 10 months today. We were really struggling to keep them off the kitchen counters and had a notion that if we got them a perch that was higher and cooler that they would hang out there instead. All of the cat "trees" I found on initial Google searches were those carpeted mulitlevel things that were pretty ugly. Our hipster cats vetoed those, of course, and sent me back to the interwebs for a more contemporary option.  Boy did I get an eyeful--a few of my early finds:

The Danish Entry (complete with PhotoShopped kittens):

 The German Entry:

And my personal favorite the Russian entry:

I decide that I needed something really high though and I found it in the Franklin Cat Tower, designed by architect Peter Sehorsch and made partially from off the shelf IKEA parts. We decided to put it in the highest corner (17') of the living room where the kittens could have a wide view of the forest. It is a very elegant solution for this location and the metal support standoffs integrated nicely with the windowsils.

The adjustable shelves spiral around the pole and allowed convenient placement.

Even before assembly was complete Jaco and Joni moved in.

Turns out its a pretty cool place to hang out night or day.

From this vantage point they can see any morsel of food left by the humans on the kitchen counters which they hang out on just about as much as they used to.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Glimpse

During the design and building phases of Cassilhaus, Ellen and I had a moratorium on art buying as we were actively collecting drywall, faucets, and appliances.  The last few years, however, we have returned to our favorite art fairs and started collecting photography again. Included with these finds are several pieces from our resident artists. I decided that our fall show would be a survey of recent discoveries and a look at the direction our collection was headed. 

Right around the time I decided to put the show together I had just shot some iPhone images in Duke Forest. One of them I titled glimpse (above) and it seemed an apt title for the show. I enlisted the aid of dear friend and wonderful curator Huston Paschal as well as our new Duke MFA intern Rachel Boillot to put the show together. Given the ecclectic nature of our collecting, it was an interesting challenge to put a show together with date of purchase as the basic selection criterion.  Almost Immediately though, interesting pairings and juxtapositions started to present themselves.  Huston prepared a wonderful checklist. Download Glimpse checklist Final

Rachel and I hung the show and went through 4 or 5 rounds of sequencing.

Joni assisted.  The Kertész was her favorite.

Vinyl girl as always did an incredible job on the show graphics.  I found a company in Florida that would custom color match the groovy olive green color I wanted to use.

 

The lead image of the show on the gallery entry wall is an Emmet Gowin image called Edith, Chincoteague, Virginia, 1967 and it is one of the most beautiful prints I have ever seen.  It is now my favorite piece in our collection. The reproduction here does not do it justice.

Our friends from Waynesville Chris and Malea came down for the opening and to help with last minute patching and painting and food prep.  The opening was packed and quite an affair.

Nasher Museum director Sarah Schroth and Center for Documentary Studies Director Wesley Hogan discuss Chris McCaw's piece from his Sunburned Series.

Photographer power trio Elizabeth Matheson, Susan Harbage Page, and Caroline Vaughan.

 

David Summer of Framers Corner and Peter Nisbet, Chief Curator at the Ackland Museum, delight in Lisa McCarty's Impossible Project Instant Film Series Cassilhaus on the First Day of Autumn.

Bryan and Rachel Andregg share a moment in front of Georges Rousse's Baldwin #1 Durham NC.

MJ Sharp makes the case for rotting fruit as the best still life subject and Nancy Townsend and Rachel Boillot have drunk the KoolAid. MJ has two wonderful pieces in the show.

David Simonton, his wife Carolyn, and Ellen.

I had a wonderful studio visit with David earlier in the year. He has photographed in over 350 North Carolina towns.  Check out his map!

I fell in love with his image from an abandoned school in Chinquapin, North Carolina

 

Another of my favorite finds in the past few years has been Laura Findlay. When Cassilhaus visiting artist Dave Anderson came to town, he had a copy of the Oxford American Literary Magazine with him.  He is doing video work for them now.  I couldn't take my eyes off Laura's image on the cover.

I tracked her down in Canada where she is finishing up her MFA.  I got the first print in the edition of this wonderful piece called Tim. It is crazy beautiful.

There has been much talk in recent years about the growing popularity of "process based" work in the photo world. I would loosely define this as work where the process of making the image is a major component of the artwork itself.  I'll be doing a post next month about our most recent visiting artist Chris McCaw's photographs which certainly falls into this category.  Another wonderful artist working in this vein is Alison Rossiter whose cameraless abstract images on expired vintage photo paper expand the notion of what a photograph is or can be.

 

Gevaert Gevarto 47, exact expiration date unknown, circa 1960s, processed 2013 (#7); unique

4 gelatin silver prints

 

Just when I lull myself into the notion that everything has been done before in photography, someone like Alison comes along and blows that notion out of the water. I continue to make amazing and wonderful discoveries almost on a monthly basis. Thanks for taking a glimpse with me.

Cassilhaus on the Road

Occassionally we get to turn the tables on our visiting artists and visit THEM!  Just this August we went to the Boston area to visit our niece and nephew and we took the opportunity to visit two very recent Cassilhaus artists Michael Prince and Rachel Perry In my previous post you met Michael and learned of his JUMP series-his son and his friends jumping off a pier very close to his beautiful home in Magnolia, MA.  He threatened Ellen and I with the offer to add us to the series and to his surprise we took him up on it.  We had a lovely kayak trip out to a small island near the pier and then Michael photographed us from the boat.  It was a lot higher than we had imagined.

Many more style points for me than my wife. We also got to see Michael's lovely home and studio and meet his wife and son.

30 minutes away in Annisquam we had a wonderful visit with Rachel and her husband Bruce.  They have such a beautiful home and treated us like family.

Rachel has so many great projects going on simultaneaously and it was a rich experience to be in her studio spaces to see the things being created we had learned about during her residency and some new projects as well.  After one magnificent meal with her family she told us of her tradition of embroidering the names of her dinner guests into her tablecloth.

She had Ellen and I sign in pencil and a few weeks later I got a photo of a work in progress!

We took a wonderful walk along the water and caught up on all the things going on since we were last together.

 

These new found friendships from the residency are such a gift.  A little more than a year ago we didn't even know these people and now we can't wait for our next visit.  A few weeks ago Rachel sent me a beautiful note about her time here at Cassilhaus:

 

"My experience at Casilhaus was a rich season of contrasts: I spent many hours working in blessed solitude with only nature as a distraction, and I attended cultural events as far ranging as lectures and openings at the Nasher Museum to the North Carolina State Fair. The generosity of Frank and Ellen underpins the experience of being at Casilhaus – everything is there for the benefit of the artist making her work. The sense that Art is All seeps from every aspect of the residency. It was a true pleasure to live and work at Casilhaus for three weeks, and a bonus to make dear friends for life."

 

 

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!