Cassilhaus

Cassilkitties

When Fripp and Siberry passed away earlier this year they left some very big paw prints to fill. Ellen and I eventully got to a place where we were ready for kitten energy again and thanks to our friends at Independant Animal Rescue we got it in spades! Meet Joni and Jaco.

Yes we know.  They are the two most beautiful kittens ever to claw the earth. I visited about 8 sibbling pairs in foster homes and shelters and knew these two had to come home. They are sister and brother and inseparable.  They run 1000 miles an hour and then collapse for a good 6 hour nap.

We have a tradition of naming our cats after musical figures and Ellen named these guys for Joni Mitchell and Jaco Pastorius who collaborated frequently for about 4 years on 3 of Joni's studio albums. In 1983 Ellen was in New York with some friends and she was in a bar and went to get a drink and the guy next to her pointing to the sound system said "That's me playing.  Let me get you a beer."  When she returned to the group, her jazz loving boyfriend exclaimed in reverent tones "do you have any idea who you were just speaking with??? That is Jaco Pastorius-the greatest bassist of all time" She had no idea. I have some history too. In a very previous lifetime (1979) I was a roadie for Joni and Jaco on the Shadows and Light tour.  Video clip here of one of their great performances. Yours truly below with Joni. It was a heady time for a 21 year old. 

These two are off the charts fun and the light of our lives now. They are eating like Great Danes and even though they are not yet 6 months old they have almost doubled in size since we got them.VERY curious but surprisingly well behaved for kittens.They seem to have instinctively figured out that they can't play with the art but everything else is fair game.

Jaco is the contortionist.  How does he do this?

Joni takes very good care of her brother.

when she is not beating the crap out of him.

Joni is focused on her modeling career.

 

Jaco is focused on Jaco

Well that was exhausting.  Time for another nap.

“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”

                    --Christopher Hitchens
 

 

Dave Anderson

I met Dave Anderson at FotoFest Houston in 2004. Ellen and I made some passing comment at breakfast about wishing we could be a fly on the wall during portfolio reviews and even though there were none scheduled that day, our friend Maria Sicardi told us to wait just a moment and she'd see what she could do.  To our horror she had set us up in a ballroom to review portfolios for emerging photographers who just wanted to show their work--even to folks who had no idea at all how to review a portfolio.  We saw some great work that day and made a life long friend in Dave.  We have followed and collected his work and his spectacular book projects. We bought a wonderful print called Breeze that ended up on the cover of Rough Beauty.

Dave hails from Little Rock Arkansas and when we visited him there a few years ago we told him about our residency and we planted a seed.  The seed bore fruit in April of this year.  Dave goes deep into his projects.  He lives in and among the people he photographs and videos.  I asked him what he wanted to do here and I confess I am still not sure I understand it.  He sent us this:

“In the Water”

Dave Anderson

During my time at Cassilhaus, I will be working on developing a repeatable and location-agnostic project tentatively entitled, “In the Water.” The project, as currently envisioned, involves three parts: 1) The creation of a research-driven “Observation Document” that is meant to capture the reality of a city’s history, character and socioeconomic reality; followed by 2) a large-scale, multi-artist-driven “Rumination” on the findings in the Observation Document; and realized with 3) a city-wide public exhibition and reflection on what the Observation & Rumination stages reflect about the city. 

My principal goal during this time in North Carolina is less-focused on creating art and more so on how to develop a realistic and scalable framework for launching such an endeavor. Durham would certainly be an apt location for such a project, but it is not a requirement of my time there.

During his time here we connected him with community leaders, urban planners, and academics and I think he has made a small dent in the project.  He also gave a wonderful talk about his work.

Turns out Dave is doing a lot more video work than still photography these days.  He pitched a monthly video series about unique southern stories called SoLost to the Oxford American Magazine and 4 years and over 40 episodes later he is still going strong.  Spend a little time with some of these amazing vignettes.  He even did one about Ellen and me and Cassilhaus. We hope to get Dave back here so there will be another chapter to our story.

 

 

The Chair Storage Buffet

We have quite a few artist events here and we have assembled a collection of a few dozen black folding chairs which we lug out for our guests.  We have been storing them on the screened porch for easy access but they have been getting covered with dirt and pollen and getting generally nasty.  Ellen and I hit upon the idea of building a chair storage unit from some of the remaining cedar we milled from our land and always wanting to kill two birds we thought we'd get that serving buffet we always wanted out there as well.  Being Cassilhaus it had to, of course, be trapezoidal. We engaged our dear friend and fabulous craftsman James Baxter to assist. We knew he would be on board. We drew up a preliminary design which involved taking down a good chunk of the south wall of the porch and moving the door West by about a foot.

The clearnace under the window was precisely enough to get the chairs in and out and gave us a nice connection to the beautiful cedar top.  When we milled our trees we left a few thick slabs with live edges anticipating this type of use and James took two of them and seamed them in the shop.

We also had some of the cedar siding from the house that we wanted to use for the doors and end panels and I worked on sanding and staining them while Ellen and James worked on the framing of the cabinet.

Moving the door and adjusting the wall was pretty straight forward.  We removed all of the screens, cut all of the elements, and shifted everything down a foot and put it back together.

The next step was to route out a channel on the underside of the top slab to accommodate the door roller hardware.

When things got dark and stormy we moved into the carport.

We had to take a hiatus for a few weeks to get everyone's schedule aligned and then we finished up the edges, trim, and hardware on the doors and put it all together!

We decided on having a small piece of granite at the end of the buffet and its our only remaining punch list item.  We want a live edge on it and our friends at Prescott Stone who did our kitchen counters are going to do it as soon as we get them a drawing.

The finished product!

 

ADF Party 2013-Mark Haim Dancers

We are very excited to celebrate our 5th year hosting a post-performance party for one of the American Dance Festival companies and how better to celebrate than by hosting former Cassilhaus Fellow Mark Haim and his company after their electric performance of This Land is Your Land at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke. Mark had already started working on this piece when he was here in 2011 and has continued to refine it at major performances in Seattle and Paris. The collaboration with the Nasher provided a wonderful venue for the performance. This party has always been one of our favorite events and regular readers will remember previous posts.

Leah, Rosie, and Mark yuckking it up.

Checking out the sculpture above of another former Cassilhaus Fellow Patrick Dougherty.

Ellen outdid herself again on the food.

Executive Director Jodee Nimerichter continues to bring the finest modern dance in the world directly to our doorstep every summer.

Not sure if these are dancing shoes.

Choreographers Rosie Herrera and Faye Driscoll.

 It was a fantastic evening. Thanks to everyone.

Total Reflective Abstraction

As usual I am woefully behind on my posts--three exhibitions behind to be exact.  Last Fall I asked Lisa our intern if she wanted to curate a show from our collection and she jumped at the chance. It would be the first time we had a show at Cassilhaus drawn entirely from our collection and curated by someone other than Ellen and I.  She put together a wonderful show called Total Reflective Abstraction. Her essay and check list are here: Download Cassilhaus Artwork List TRA Short with Essay. It was fascinating to see these images that we have collected placed in a new context and new relationships . Lisa was almost obsessed with an incredible self portrait by André Kertész called Martinique that was shot on New Years Day in 1972 and made it the centerpiece of the exhibition. Reflective has multiple meanings indeed!

This piece by Frank Hunter below is a bit of an inside joke.  My modernist architect wife is not a big fan of curtains so she says this piece fullfils all of our curtain needs in the house (it normally lives in our living room on the window sill).  It is a platinum palladium print on Japanese tissue and we have framed it with glass on both sides of the print and it is amazing how the curtain glows.

I thought some of Lisa's pairings were inspired.

Thank you Lisa.

"Total Reflective Abstraction might be seen as an expression of our urge towards perfection itself, the secular corollary to a heaven in which thought and the body are one. As a visual modality it is infinite in its ability to project before us new perspectives, distortions, extensions. It is timeless, or perhaps it is time itself, because it only exists, as it exists, now, in the moment of looking.”                                  

-Josiah McElheny

 

 

 

The Artists' Shade Garden

In our second project using the wonderful milled cedar from our land, I made a bench for a new shade garden behind our recently completed trellis. 

Ellen had been working on the notion of a small private shade/meditation garden for our visiting artists and we had the perfect shady spot right beside the artist apartment.  My friend Linda loves to do stone work and I asked her if she could make a circular wall around the garden and she jumped at the chance.  Well jumped is perhaps not the appropriate term--it took her a year--but she likes to continually "rework" her art :).

Here Linda and Ellen think big rock thoughts over a power oatmeal breakfast. All of the rocks came from our land as well--we keep finding large troves buried around the property presumably from the days when this was a working farm and the farmers were clearing the fields.

After Ellen and I argued for a while about the location of the bench we put it right in the middle of our two chosen locations which of course turned out to be the best location anyway.

Our summer helper Mark leveled out the ground with more wheelbarrows full of fill than I want to recall and spread some mulch.

Never one to miss an opportunity to go to the plant store to fill up her car, Ellen has started to disperse shade lovers around the area while Frank supervises from the bench.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

                                                            --Marcus Tulius Cicero

 

Durham Literacy Center

Thanks to the generosity of our collector friend, the late Julian Baker, and his family, we came into possession of a trove of beautiful hardwood frames.  I had this old Michael Kenna calendar sitting around which was too beautiful to throw out-printed in Japan on paper made by angels.  I hit upon the idea of using some of the frames to frame up these images and donate them to non profits who were starving for art.  Wonderful intern Lisa and I finished the first 6 and we donated them to the Durham Literacy Center. Reading and literacy were very close to my father's heart so it made me extra happy to work with them.  Photo bellow is Lisa and I with Executive Director Reginald Hodges.

 

Durham Academy

Our efforts to get more students involved here at Cassilhaus are starting to pay off.  My friend and wonderful photographer Harrison Haynes, a recent Bard MFA, has started teaching at Durham Academy and brought three sections of his intro photo classes to see Lisa McCarty's MFA thesis show (more on that in another post when the stars align) and some of the permanent collection here. It was fascinating to see them try to wrap their brains around her handmade analog film cameras and more conceptual work when their photo world to date has pretty much revolved around their iPhones.

Fortunately Lisa was on hand to explain her work to the students

Frank had to pinch hit for one class.

 

THANKS HARRISON!

 

Deborah Luster Wins Guggenheim for Photography

HUGE congratulations to New Orleans based photographer and Cassilhaus Artist-in-Residence alum Deborah Luster for being awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for her stunning and singular photographic work.

Debbie is best known for her long-term documentary series, One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (1998–2003, with poet C. D. Wright), a photographic archive of portraits of prisoners from three Louisiana prisons, including the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola; and Tooth for an Eye: a Chorography of Violence in Orleans Parish (2008–2011), a photographic archive of cityscapes documenting locations in New Orleans where homicides have been committed. Twin Palms Publishing has issued monographs of both collections.

Luster’s awards include the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize for Documentary Photography from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University (with C. D. Wright), an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the John Guttman Award, the Bucksbaum Family Award for American Photography, and a Peter S. Reed Foundation Award.

Her work is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Smithsonian American Art Museum; New Orleans Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Pier 24, San Francisco; the Margulies Collection, Miami; and other notable public and private collections.

WAY TO GO DEBBIE!

fRIPp (1999-2013)

We had to say goodbye to our dear friend Fripp today after 15 years together. I take the liberty of putting this tribute on the Cassilhaus blog because he was so much a part of the life here. He was an amazingly friendly and social cat and always had to be where the action was.  At every opening and every event he was somewhere underfoot or on someone's lap.

Fripp was particularly helpful during installation of artwork.

Hanging out with his sister Siberry

He was an exceptionally good napper.

Fripp was an extraordinary being.  Because I work at home we were pretty inseperable. He was a great friend to me and always knew when I needed support and never left my side when I was sick. I can't really imagine life around here without him. Please raise a glass to Fripp when you read this and thank him for a life extraordinarily lived. If you or someone you know would like to adopt a cat or kitten in honor of Fripp there are many that need new homes or you can support the important work of Independant Animal Rescue, Goathouse Refuge or your local animal shelter.

My brother John told me that when it rains really hard it is the world saying goodbye.  It has poured all day today.  Goodbye and thank you Fripper.

“What greater gift than the love of a cat.”
― Charles Dickens

 

 

 

DUKE FOREST SWIRLS

It's been a while since I picked up a camera to do non documentary work. One of my New Year's resolutions was to shoot more for myself.  I was walking in Duke Forest near Cassilhaus a few weeks ago and I remembered reading in David Pogue's iPhone book that the shutter release on an iPhone camera happens when you release the button rather than when you press it--the theory being  you will have less camera movement.  It was getting close to dusk and I started playing with holding the button and releasing while wildly moving my arm in various directions.  I got totally absorbed and was loving what I was getting and before I knew it my battery was dead and it was almost completely dark and I was a good 10 minutes from civilization. I managed to stumble my way to the trailhead and downloaded these when I got home.

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”

― Kahil Gibran, Sand and Foam

Macy's Day Parade

Regular readers know that occasionally we rent Cassilhaus to production companies to do still photo shoots.  A few weeks ago our friends at  Kreber were here in force with a team of 11 to do a catalog shoot for Macy's.  They were shooting dining room furnishings and accessories so EVERYTHING had to be cleared out of our living/dining area.  I love these shoots--the crew was great and made up of mostly photo geeks so they loved all of the photography here. I worked along side them and helped find props for them, move art, and wrangle Fripp. I was pretty astounded at the scale of the effort to secure 5 or 6 photos for their print catalog (their online efforts are completely separate) but we were excited to get the gig as we are now putting rental income toward travel stipends for visiting international artists. 

 
We started around 8 with the load in for the first shot.

Groovy hardware piece of the day were the suction cup drapery rods!

It was a beautiful day and they worked primarily with natural light.  Our living/dining space has windows on all 4 sides and they used large reflectors to corral the light onto the scene.

It was fascinating to watch how fast photographer Dan Walbridge processed the photos in realtime in PhotoShop-dropping foilage backgrounds into the windows etc. He basically was ready to send off the images right after a scene had been shot.

Fripp carefully supervised all of the proceedings from his perch on high.

The sundeck was a popular spot for lunch break.

Thanks to everybody for making the place look like you were never there!  I hope to see our house in a catalog soon!

 

Mayme's Cassilhaus Nest

A few posts back we talked about commissioning former artist in residence Mayme Kratz to cast the wonderful nest she made for us while here into a floor mounted sculpture to serve as a corner stone of sorts of the house in our entry tree grate.  It turned into quite a project but we are finally finished and it looks spectacular!

We are MOST grateful to Mayme for NOT sending pictures of the work in progress as we would have completely freaked out.  Apparently resin casting involves lots of cracks and annealing.

It can be nothing less than magic that Mayme was able to make this whole again and then sand it to its current beauty.

 

Then let the installation begin!  We wanted to back light it and we wanted to control the light from the adjacent closet so I set up to chase the wires through the base of the tree grate platform to the basement below.

 

I chased the closet wall and installed a magnetic low voltage dimmer (The light we ended up using was a 12V fixture and we had to dim its transformer.)

I went through a bunch of unsuccessful trials with Christmas tree lights, LED rope lights, fluorescent light tables, etc.  Either they were too much of a point source or generated too much heat.  I did a bunch of research on side lit LED signage products and discovered a company called Lightbeam in Eugene Oregon that was amazingly helpful.  They made a 3/8" thick custom LED light panel that has very even illumination and generates almost no heat.  It was even reasonably priced!  We could have gotten a round one made but it was expensive and we ended up just using gaffer tape to make our circle as the fixture would not be seen.

The panel came with a low voltage transformer which I wired up to the dimmer and placed in the tree grate cavity.

Initial tests showed that we had unbelievably smooth dimming and adequate brightness in full daylight.

The next issue was how we were going to support the sculpture to sustain the weight of an adult human being while not crushing the light panel below.  Architect Ellen designed a 1/4" steel "table" that the light panel would slide under and had a hole in it 3/8" smaller than the sculpture.

The incomparable Neal at Vega Metals in downtown Durham fabricated the stand to incredibly tight tolerances and it worked like a dream. He needed our dinky project like he needed a hole in the head but he was gracious to a fault.

We used clear picture framing bumpers, affectionately called rubber baby buggy bumpers around here, underneath the sculpture to raise it to the proper level and give it a little cushion and also under the light panel to give it a little ventilation room. The final fit and finish is beyond all expectations.  The light works perfectly and the nest has finally found its place.  Thank you Mayme and thank you for everyone who helped make this project happen.

WELCOME TO CASSILHAUS!

 

 

 

FOGO Island

Less than a year ago Ellen and I read an article in the New York Times about a tiny island off the northern coast of Newfoundland called FOGO and the extraordinary transformation of this sleepy economically depressed fishing community into a world class artist residency destination. Spearheaded by FOGO native and entrepreneur turned philanthropist Zita Cobb and her Shorefast Foundation, spectacular modern artists studios have been built or are in the process of being built in each of the six villages on the island and artists in all disciplines from across the world are being brought to live and work on FOGO. A high end luxury hotel is nearly complete. There is only one decent restaurant on the island but Zita believes if she builds it they will come and the transformation has begun.

It doesn't take much arm twisting to get my architect wife Ellen to go on a modern architecture road trip, even if the destination is on the other side of nowhere.  We discovered that FOGO has two seasons-August and Winter.  We opted for shoulder season and went in September and of course arrived the day before a once-in-five-decades direct hit from a hurricane--an auspicious beginning to a staggeringly wonderful trip.

(click on photos to enlarge)

On day one we were doing a miraculously good imitation of those guys on the Weather Channel reporting from where you don't want to be and nearly got ourselves blown off a hiking trail.

Just when you thought there were no other sentient beings out and about we pass by a pick- up truck with the bed completely filled with water that says "Frank the Boat Builder" on the side and the headlights are pointing to Frank himself building a "punt" in the garage just like his great grandfather did.  The people of FOGO are warm and wonderful.

Boy is the weather spectacular after a hurricane.  From day 2 on it was magic.

The Squish Studio in the village of Tilting

Dusk near Tilting

The Bridge Studio in Deep Bay.

The Tower Studio near Shoal Bay

The Long Studio in Joe Batt's Arm (no I did not make that up.)

Mid-town in Joe Batt's Arm.

The village of Fogo Island.

The new hotel under construction.

Waving Goodbye.

Pennies from Photo Heaven.

It is not a question of if we will return to FOGO, only when.

 

Rachel Perry

Our final artist of the 2012 season was Gloucester, MA based conceptual multi-media artist Rachel Perry. Born in 1962, in Tokyo, Japan, Perry holds a BA from Connecticut College and a Diploma and Fifth Year Certificate from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Since graduating from art school in 2001, Perry has participated in group shows at Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany), The Drawing Center (New York) and at the Institute of Contemporary Art, (Boston, Massachusetts), where she was a Finalist for the Foster Prize and her work entered the permanent collection in 2006. Perry was awarded the Cathrine Boettcher Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony (2009-2010), and is a two-time winner of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Award for excellence in drawing and sculpture. Solo shows include “Lost in my Life” at Yancey Richardson Gallery (New York), “Same Difference” at Barbara Krakow Gallery (Boston) and her first solo museum show “Rachel Perry 24/7” traveled from the deCordova Museum (Massachusetts) to the Zimmerli Museum (New Jersey) in January 2012.

Lost in My Life (Price Tags) 2009 Courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery

Inviting Rachel to the Cassilhaus Residency was an impulse (turns out a fantastic one).  I had seen her work only months before at Yancey Richardson's booth at an art fair. I didn't know her work and it wasn't like anything in our collection but hit a strong conceptual cord with me and I liked it instantly.  Her stay was the shortest 3 weeks ever. I feel like I should wax on about her work and her process but my overwhelming impression of her time here was that we had a BLAST.  Rachel is just game for anything and dove head first into all things Cassilhaus and Durham. I literally drove her from the airport on day 1 to the Kerry James Marshall lecture at the Nasher Museum and we didn't slow down until she headed home.  We definitely showed her the Triangle cultural extremes from the NC State Fair (her first ever state fair) where I have documentary evidence of her eating a deep fried Reese's Peanut Butter Cup AND the scariest Polish sausage thing I have ever seen,

with the requisite Elvis sighting (love the bag)

to the next day sipping wine with Dick Brodhead, the President of Duke University, at a Nasher gala reception and everything in between.

Rachel gave a fantastic artist talk covering an incredibly diverse range of work to an SRO crowd.

Ellen, Cici, and Bryant yuck it up.

Ron gets caught by surprise.

Esther and Jackie O!

Janet stole the show with the Pollack Crocs.

One of the amazing projects Rachel talked about was her bread tabs project where she drew from her collection of nearly a half milliion plastic bread tabs to make a sculptural piece called 208,896 loaves.

(photos courtesy of Rachel Perry)

 She had us all on the floor with her hilarious video of "Karaoke Wrong Number" where she did frighteningly spot on recreations of wrong number messages on her answering machine.

A lot of her time here was spent working on fruit sticker drawings.  She collects massive numbers of adhesive labels from fruit and slices them to make collage drawings.

 

 

Chiquita Delicata, 2012           

fruit stickers and archival adhesive on paper (with detail) Courtesy Rachel Perry

One of Rachel's favorite stops here (and now a required visit for all Cassilhaus Fellows) was Durham's Scrap Exchange. Talk about a kid in a candy store.  We gave her an assignment to make a project out of a random bag of stuff on offer and she just got started on an interesting piece.

We can't wait to see where she goes next.  We miss her terribly.  Thank you Rachel.

The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.      --Eudora Welty

 

 

 

 

 

PhotObama!

Ellen and I were looking for a creative way to raise some real money to reelect President Obama. We hit upon the idea of having a fine art photography auction and PhotObama was born!  It is a blessing that I had no idea just how immense the amount of work would be to pull something like this off until it was too late.  I put out some feelers to photographer and collector friends and the response was overwhelmingly generous.  Almost before I knew it we had 30 very fine photographs and willing volunteers.  My dear friend Huston offered to put together the catalog.  Gary with Weaver Street Realty agreed to be our auctioneer.  John and Robin of Lip Service Catering not only agreed to cater the event for 70 people but donate ALL of the food! Craven Allen Gallery matted and framed a bunch of the donations AND gave us framing gift certificates.  Other dear friends came forward to offer financial sponsorship of the event and we ended up with 43 co-hosts! In a very intense week we managed to get all of the pieces here and hung AND get another new photography show hung in the gallery upstairs.  I could not have done it without our wonderful intern Lisa who is in the new MFA program at Duke.  She was with me through the patching and painting, matting and framing, curating, lighting, and cleaning. 

Jesse Kalisher's stunning image of Obama in Chapel Hill was a huge hit.

North Carolina photographers John Rosenthal, David Simonton, Dan Gottlieb, and Tom Rankin were among the 24 photographers in the auction preview gallery.

Lisa and Diane at the registration desk.

Two of our wonderful co-hosts Helen and Jesse tour the new show in the upstairs gallery.

Diane, a full time volunteer with the Obama campaign, fires up the troops before the auction.  She is completely inspiring.  She shared with us this wonderful video:

 

Gary kept the energy level high and the bids flowing.  Ilana was spotting while Ellen played Vanna.

The big action came from the balcony.

Except when Jim and David fought it out on the floor.

A few of the the hottest items of the evening were MJ Sharp's Escaping the Family Reunion

Elizabeth Matheson's Old Bank Milton, NC

Lori Vrba's Blindfold

and Dan Gottlieb's Winter Forest 4

You can check out the whole catalog here-- Download Cassilhaus PhotObama Auction Catalog Final

The energy in the room was incredible and we TRIPLED our $8000 goal raising an unbelievable $25,000!  We were over the moon. The support from the Obama campaign, Diane, and all of our friends and co-hosts was extraordinary.  After the dissapointment of losing the NC Amendment One fight it felt great to feel such great momentum in moving the country FORWARD!

There is much still to be done.  Ellen and I are phone banking every Tuesday.  We hope you will join us.  The link to our fundraising site will be live right up to the election and we welcome each of our readers to donate here.

 

GOBAMA!

 

Deborah Luster

When we started the Cassilhaus Artist Residency, we just assumed that as avid photography collectors we would host a bunch of photographers in our residency. To be sure we have had wonderful artists here who work with photography but I doubt any one of them would label themselves a pure photographer. Who knew it would take us more than 3 years. Deborah Luster, our most recent resident, wears that moniker proudly. Her path to photography was tragically unique. She took up the camera as a way to rememerge into the world and find her voice after the murder of her mother by a hired hit man in 1988. The incident forever colors her work and gives it potent emotional content. Deborah has been a friend since our days of hanging out at a biennial artist confab in Black Mountain, NC. We were thrilled that we could talk her into joining us here. She came to international attention with her amazing prison photography project and book called One Big Self. The book grew out of a collaboration with poet C.D. Wright that won the CDS Dorothea Lange/Paul Taylor prize.

She was initially supposed to be with us for the month of May but got a call about a once in a lifetime project--photographing death row inmates from Angola Prison performing The Life of Jesus Christ. All of Deborah's contacts and early projects in the prison gave her unprecedented access and NPR did a lengthy piece you can check out here and a slide show here. Make sure you listen to the individual audio vingettes with each photo. Female inmates from a sister prison performed as well in a first ever co-ed production of The Passion Play in a Louisiana prison. The stories and images of this project are just astounding.

We had a fantastic time catching up in the first half of June. Deborah has a ton of friends in the area so there was always lots going on. Below she makes herself immediately at home in the Spoon tub!

She gave a wonderful artist talk to an SRO crowd.  I've never seen so many photograhers at an event here.  We got the very first look at her new Angola work.

Thank you Deborah for everything.

 

"It is really easy to hide behind a camera."  -Deborah Luster

ADF Party 2012--Scottish Dance Theater

For the fourth year in a row we have been asked to host a cast and crew party at Cassilhaus for one of the companies of the American Dance Festival here in Durham and as usual the event was one of the highlights of our year. Past events were for H. Art Chaos, Brenda Angiel Aeial Dance Company, and Shen Wei Dance Arts. Under new director Jodee Nimerichter we are seeing some new faces at the ADF and what a wonderful treat to get to see the very first US performance of the Scottish Dance Theater.  I don't know what I was expecting but their performance wasn't it!  I was mesmerized.  I link here to my friend and fellow blogger Kate Dobbs Arial who is a dance critic to give the performance its due.  As they used to say on Saturday Night Live--If it's not Scottish its crap! We made some wonderful new friends and hope SDT will be a regular at ADF!

New ADF director Jodee Nimerichter (in green) with company members.

 

Head of the School of Architecture at NC State Robin Abrams with Ellen

 

Dance is the hidden language of the soul.

Martha Graham

 

 

 

 

THE TRELLIS

After our great Cedar Milling Adventure we were itching to use some of our beautiful lumber on a project.  Lord knows you can't start a project without spending some money on a new tool!  We had been borrowing our friend Randy's table saw for eons and as we thought Ellen's trellis design might evolve as we figured out what viable lumber we had we decided to take the plunge and get ourselves a portable table saw and it is a beauty.  How else to you get 3 1/4" x4" cedar posts for that assymetrical look?

Note the OSHA approved dust collection system on the Tidy Cat pail.

We wanted to build a trellis to grow rasberries on the lower level and kiwis on the top.  From what we have read, kiwis can be a challenge and take a long time to fruit but if they do they apparently can be quite prolific AND quite heavy bearing as much as 300 lbs. of fruit from a single vine.  They recommended building a very hefty trellis so we accommodated.   The basic design is two independant sections with 4 large posts in a ladder configuration on each end with two horitzontal arbors of sorts at the midpoint and on the top.  The two sections are set at an angle to each other to form an entry into a new shade garden.  Pictures are worth a thousand words.

We did a really nice countersink for the bolts for the ladder rungs.

These are the "arbors".  Different lengths for the top and mid section.  They are offset to the south to accommodate growth toward the sun.

 

It was very helpful to be able to mock up the design as we fabricated it in the carport.

Bracing attached to the "ladders" supports the "arbors"

 

At the end of weekend one we had "finished" one section and loaded it up on our otherwise worthless garden cart and spent a lot of time cleaning up cedar saw dust.

After the 500$+ in chiropractor, rolfer, and massage therapist bills after the deer fence project, I elected to rent an auger from Home Depot and enlist the aid of Julian to run it.

On weekend two we fabricated the second trellis section and did our installation.

We used some left over cedar for bracing and mixed up the concrete right in the holes.

Our friend and Cassilhaus artist in residence Deborah Luster jumped in to help with the project!

We used decking screws to do the final assembly.

LET THE PLANTING BEGIN!!

 

MAYME KRATZ

Once again I find myself overwhelmed by how rich the experience is of having visiting artists sharing our home, lives, and community. Mayme Kratz was our first artist of 2012 and it was a love fest from the moment the plane touched down. Mayme hails from Phoenix, AZ and we met her through a dear friend of ours, Lisa Sette, who owns Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale and represents Mayme's work. She is also a good friend of 2010 Cassilhaus fellow Marie Navarre who gave us gentle hints that Mayme MIGHT be interested in coming to the residency too!

One of the first stops we make with visiting artists is to Durham's Scrap Exchange, a creative reuse/recycling center. We found a large box of these amazing old scientific glass slides and unanimously declared that Marie would love and use them in her work. Even the old glassine sleeves they are in are beautiful. It's always great to see this kind of material find a new life in art.

When we were in Scottsdale we fell in love with Mayme's resin work where she casts natural materials into translucent resins but we weren't prepared to discover the breadth of her artistic practice she shared with us at Cassilhaus.

We discovered her video, poetry, works on paper, installation, and sculpture--all around her work with nature and natural materials.

Our home is adjacent to 1600 acres of Duke Forest and while many visiting artists have enjoyed the occassional walk in the woods, Mayme devoured the forest.  She came to us without a car and a computer and her enthusiasm to be HERE and about this place and this time was inspriring.  Many days she spent 4 and 5 hours in the forest gathering materials and becoming part of this place.  Sometimes it takes a stranger to show you your own back yard.

While here Mayme experimented with tree rubbings and various works on paper. (click to enlarge any photo in this post)

She also started fabricating nests from the materials she found on her walks.  The most interesting (and scary) was the mysterious "black moss"

The nest work led us to ask Mayme about doing a commission for the entry of our home.  When we designed the house we wanted to use an industrial tree grate as an entry pad.  We loved the material and it was a practical way to deal with dirt etc. that came in through the front door. We wanted to eventually ask an artist to make some sort of "cornerstone" for the house to fill the large hole in the grate and we temporarily put a section of a tree stump in as a place holder.  The tree section has worked so well that we have been living with it for 3+ years and I wish I had a dollar for everyone who has asked us if we cut off the tree in place from under the house. 

The nest seemed the perfect metaphor for our house so Mayme made a nest to fit and took it back to Phoenix to be cast into a circular resin form.  We hope to light it from underneath.  Stay tuned!

Mayme gave an artist talk while she was here to a very enthusiastic crowd. We were able to see a video of her amazing recent installation called The Bower--a free standing 12'x12'x12' structure made of tumble weed.

Durham based installation artist Cici Stevens bonded immediately with Mayme.

We wanted to do a small show of Mayme's work while she was here so she sent some of her work from a collaboration she did with photographer Tim Lanterman called the Dark Matter Series. These natural-materials-in-resin-over-photograph pieces are astoundingly beautiful and have a three dimensional quality.

We have a wonderful new intern at Cassilhaus named Lisa McCarty (more on Lisa in a future post) who is a talented photographer and is enrolled in the inaugural class of Duke's new MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts. We asked her to help us curate the show and she enthusiastically stepped in and it looks amazing.

It was the first time we really used the entry gallery to its full potential and we finally got some lighting for the white metal display bookcase. Mayme showed some of her "memory cubes" in this case.

It became almost instantly clear to Ellen and I that we are getting so much more from this residency than we are giving. Mayme has such a generosity of spirit and has left a part of herself here both literally and figuratively.  We have a door in the artists pod where we ask our visiting artists to leave "their mark" from their stay (more on the door in a future post) and Mayme left us this extraordinary poem in the form of a treasure hunt to find "celebrations" she had left in the woods.  I wrestled for a long while about whether to share such a personal gift that Mayme had made for us on the blog but erred on the side of sharing these beautiful creations with others. 

 

Ellen loves a treasure hunt and we both had a good time (LOTS OF TIME!) trying to solve the puzzle and find what she left as an offering to the forest.  Here is the poem:

 

path below pod

last days of beech

stand still

breath

 

edge of new hope

space of a clearing

cardinal for cardinal

 

stepping stones

past sleeping tree

where light is late

 

dense black

look low

flame memory

arrive

'here'

 

We had our young assistants Vivian and Lela with us to track down the "Cardinal for Cardinal."

After searching unsuccessfully for a few days, Mayme offered some hints and got us going in the right direction.  She even had left talismans of sorts along the path to let us know we were headed in the right direction (see spiral in the creek.)

Imagine our surprise to see just how wonderful it was to arrive "HERE" We were so touched that Mayme had left a part of herself here on our land and helped us to build a deeper sense of place.

 

Three weeks went by in an instant. We miss Mayme so much and we are not the only ones.  Fripp immediately recognized Mayme as a cat person (she has 6) and insinuated himself on a regular basis in the artist pod.

Over time I have come to think of these three qualities--paying intimate attention; a storied relationship to a place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place--as a fundamental human defense against loneliness. If you're intimate with a place, a place with whose history you're familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you're there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.

As a writer I want to ask on behalf of the reader: How can a person obtain this? How can you occupy a place and also have it occupy you? How can you find such a reciprocity?

The key, I think, is to become vulnerable to a place. If you open yourself up, you can build intimacy. Out of such intimacy may come a sense of belonging, a sense of not being isolated in the universe.

-- Barry Lopez

 

AMENDMENT ONE AND CASSILHAUS' FIRST ACTIVIST IN RESIDENCE

Over the past 4-5 months Ellen and I have been actively involved in trying to defeat the hateful and discriminatory Amendment One on the May 8 NC Ballot.  We have been phone banking, had a fund raiser here at Cassilhaus (see below), and have been using lots of creative methods to get the word out.  We got a request from the campaign to house out-of- state campaign staff who would be coming in during the final week of the defeat Amendment One effort and the timing worked perfectly between two visiting artists so we offered up our artist apartment.  Little did we know that we would get the woman who was heading up the whole effort from the Human Rights Campaign in DC! Karin Quimby , our first Activist in Residence, is the HRC regional field director for the Southern US and a complete delight.  Even though she is working 15 hours a day we have been able to get the inside scoop on the campaign and are excited to have her energy here at the house.  Another first for Cassilhaus.

Ellen and I were able to catch a quick lunch today with Karin.  Love Conquers Hate says it all. 

Back in March (slacker blogger) we hosted an anti-Amendment fund raiser here with our friends Wendy and Piper from NOSH restaurant and Jimmy Creech, a reknowned pastor and passionate advocate for gay rights. 

We were also fortunate to have Adam Limehouse, the regional field director from Protect All NC Families, on hand to explain the startegy and ground campaign for the effort.

 

One final bit of fun is our Crows Against the Amendment campaign. One of these photos ran in both the Durham and Chapel Hill News this Sunday and the clipping tells the story.

 

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illumines it.

                                                 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Dan Gottlieb

With New-Years-Resolution-Fervor I am making a post within 24 hours of an event. Woohoo!  I have known Dan Gottlieb for a good long while but I am embarrased to say that I did not know he was a photograher. I know him in his role as Director of Design and Planning at the North Carolina Museum of Art. About 8 months or so ago I got an email about a photo exhibition of Dan's work at Sam Reynolds Design Gallery in Asheville.  I loved the work and immediately contacted Dan to see when he was going to have a show in the Triangle because I wanted to see the work in person. He said he didn't have a venue for a show and I told him I thought we could solve that problem. The Aldwyth Cigar Box show was already up in the center of the gallery and I wanted to leave it up for a while.  As odd as it initially sounded, we talked about putting up Dan's show on the perimeter of the gallery and having both shows up at once. I went over to Dan's place and we talked about which work to include and came up with a set that we both thought would work. At the end of the day I think his show and the Aldwyth work were absolutely great together.

The thing that I really love about Dan's photography is that it doesn't look anything like photography. He tells me his images are long exposure (4-8 seconds) digital images made entirely in-camera with no manipulation or post production in PhotoShop etc. To look at them you swear you are looking at a pastel or a painting. If I didn't know Dan better I would think he was actually bending the truth.

(Eno River State Park 2, North Carolina 2010)

(Basilica Cistern, Istanbul, 2010)

(Derinkuyu Underground City, Cappadocia, 2010)

The images are dreamlike and completely draw you in. When asked about what the pieces are about he says they are not about anything--just his feelings and interactions with his subject.  I came up with the title approach for the show as it seemed to capture that special approach and dance he has with his subjects.

Many of the pieces were shot on a 3 week trip to Turkey in 2010 including my favorite from the show:

(Burqas, Sultan Ahmet Parki, Istanbul, 2010)

One of the most haunting images in the group is Roman Head I taken at the Archaeology Museum in Istanbul.

One of the things that made for such a beautiful presentation of the work was Dan's own custom designed and built frames. He has even applied for a patent for this unique frame that has the print mounted to Sintra board and then floated on another piece of Sintra, surrounded by a deeply bevelled wooden surround and then faced with a special etched plexiglass.  Dan's design expertise was clearly on display with these precise and elegant frames that transform his prints into three dimensional photographic objects.

The opening last night was magical.  We had about 75 people and lots of new folks to Cassilhaus which we always love.

Deb and Cici take a closer look.

Betsy and Mark smile at Aldwyth's "Resume"

Liz and Mike decide which one they want to take home.

Dan and Roger discuss the finer points of his work.

Lillian is clear about her preferences.

The adoring masses listen while Dan speaks from the gallery rail.

Dan's wife Liz cheers him on. Liz thanks for your help with the opening!

The energy was great all evening. We are so charged by having all of this creative energy in our home.  Thanks Dan for sharing your amazing work.

Cigar Box Encyclopaedia (CBE)

A did a post a while back about artist-in-residence Aldwyth's stay with us and show at the gallery. We have stayed close and visited her in South Carolina last year. Aldwyth had shared with us that the owner of one of her seminal pieces, Cigar Box Encylopaedia (yes that is how she spells it), wanted to find a new home for it and Ellen and I excitedly signed on.  The piece consists of 26 collaged cigar boxes, one for each letter of the alphabet and all items in each box begin with that letter. When we were down in South Carolina we had a wonderful "passing of the baton" ceremony from Joe and Carolyn, the previous owners, and a few tears were shed.

Even though the piece did travel on the three city museum tour in 2009-2010, including the Ackland in Chapel Hill, we decided to mount a show here at Cassilhaus Gallery so more folks would get a chance to experience it up close and personal (Aldwyth hated it that people were not allowed to touch the boxes during the museum shows). The original museum show was curated by Mark Sloan, the director and senior curator at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston which was one of the venues on the tour.  Mark commissioned a wonderful video about Aldwyth's work and had high resolution photographs of the tops and bottoms of each of the boxes made to exhibit above the boxes so viewers could see all sides of the pieces.  Mark graciously provided both the video and the photographs for our exhibition.

I had never installed anything like this before.  In the museum shows the boxes were installed on long shelves and I wanted them to be more independent.  After a few false starts with various plastic materials, Ellen suggested we get custom fabricated metal shelves.  I went to Young Roofing in Durham (truly the land that time forgot) and showed them a sketch and they made me brackets out of 24 guage stainless steel scraps and I put picture frame bumpers on them to provide enough friction to hold the boxes in place.

It was our first use of video in an exhibition here.  I found a flat panel TV with a built in DVD player and it worked very well.

Ellen has become the vinyl letter specialist.

I have to say that the exhibition looked fabulous.

We were completely thrilled when Aldwyth agreed to come to the opening in October.  She brought one of her amazing large format (6'x6') collages, Casablanca (colorized version) to exhibit just for the opening.

I have to admit is was my first experience with a non fabric artist ironing their work!

The opening was a smashing success and Aldwyth really made our experience of the work rich with her many anecdotes and stories of making the piece.

Fripp, however, was unmoved.

I reprised my alphabet shortbread cookies to honor the occassion.

Even after living with the piece for 5 months I have not even scratched the surface of all of the amazing details I keep discovering.  The "G" box-

The "K" box.

The "O" box.  That's a real ostrich egg.

The "Z" box

The "S" box is one of my favorites.  Where else do you get Superman on a spoon in a shark's mouth?

The "Q"

A detail from the lid of the "P" box.

and the side of the "A" box.

It is an amazingly rich experience to get to know artists and their work with this level of intimacy.  Thank you Aldwyth for sharing your world.

Meals from the Market 2011

I am woefully far behind on my posts but I didn't want to leave out our annual Meals from the Market fundraising event for Durham Central Park last fall. Every year, along with our intrepid co-hosts Grace, Mary Jane, Morgan, and Renee, we host a dinner or party to benefit park expansion.  For 2011 we had a sit down dinner for 24 which stretched out to the screened porch.
Ellen and our cousin Jeanne head up the chef team.

 

It was a New Orleans Jazz Brunch theme.

mahalo Jazz duo Alison Weiner and Doug Largent kept our toes tapping.

Even Fripp dressed for the occassion.

CEDAR MILLING

Back in 2008 when we cleared our land we asked our contractor to save all of the red cedar trees on the property for some as yet undetermined future building project.

Of course, nearly 4 years later, we had these huge stacks of cedar logs at the permimeter of our property untouched and providing a virtual Club Med for snakes. In a almost evangelical spurt of motivation we decided to hire a portable saw mill operator and Ellen and I (along with the vastly stronger Julian) moved all of the logs up to our carport in anticipation of his arrival.  Some of the logs were so heavy we had to cut them up to move.

The saw mill guy promptly blew us off (our stack apparently unworthy) and we shared the carport with the logs for another 3 months.  We finally found the fabulous Mike Spanolia from Haw River Timber Mill and he brought his bright shiny and ENORMOUS portable mill to our driveway on a beautiful November day and we had a blast.  We still didn't have a definite idea of exactly what we wanted to make with our cedar--chicken coops, trellises, an entry table, shelves, and cedar salmon boards all were on the wish list so we decided to just mill each log for maximum yield.  Because it is all for us, we could decide to make 3 1/8" x 3 1/8" posts if we liked or 2 x 7 1/4s or whatever.

 

One of Ellen's student's Ben helped us haul the logs to the mill.  It had all of these cool hydraulic lifts and turners that manipulated the logs and anchored them in place for the traveling blade carriage.  The blade was a 12' long bandsaw and the mill could handle logs up to about 25' long.

The finished product was stunningly beautiful.

We created a pile of pieces that were "too beautiful to cut further" that we hope to use for furniture applications.

We got quite a beautiful stack.

 

Ellen and I cut up all of the edge remainders for firewood and we collected two huge trash cans full of cedar saw dust.

All in all an incredibly satisfying day.  Cedar salmon planks were a popular gift item this holiday season.  Happy New Year to everyone.

As the poet said, "only God can make a tree" - probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on. 

                                         ~Woody Allen

DOUG BEUBE MONOGRAPH AND WEBSITE

Exciting news from one of our 2011 artists-in-residence, Doug Beube.  After over 6 years of gestation, he has released his career monograph--Doug Beube: Breaking the Codex and launched a comprehensive website showing his fabulous range of work in various media.  Check them both out here!

Around the eyes is a perforation the buyer of the book can remove. The lozenge shape then becomes a bookmark. Cool.

SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS

For the 3rd straight year (see post on our first party here) we were asked by the American Dance Festival to host a post performance party for one of the major touring companies in this years festival.  It is something that Ellen and I really look forward to every year and enjoy as much as the amazing dance performances themselves.  We were so honored to be asked to host Shen Wei Dance Arts this year--one of the premiere modern dance companies in the world.  Most recently Shen Wei came to the world's attention by being asked to be the principal choreographer of the opening ceremonies for the Bejing Olympics. As usual Ellen prepared a yummy feast and we had a great opportunity to get to know the company.

Sarah Tondu, ADF czarina, wtih co hosts Jim and Jane Finch.

Ellen and Co-host extraordinaire Ellen Ciompi

Shen Wei

Choreographer Mark Haim, our most recent artist in residence, with friends.

"The dance is the mother of the arts.

Music and poetry exist in time;

painting and architecture in space.

But the dance lives at once in time and space."

- Curt Sachs

 

 

MARK HAIM

In our ongoing efforts to establish collaborations with major arts organizations we contacted our friend Jodee Nimerichter,  the co-director of the American Dance Festival to inquire about hosting our first choreographer in residence.  She enthusiastically recommended Seattle based Mark Haim (rhymes with time) who incredibly would be spending his 18th!! summer in Durham with the ADF.

From student to master instructor he has become a festival institution. Mark was a delight from day one and we discovered we had many friends in common. We had a dinner party one night and dessert was the opening of a piece of art we just purchased from one of our previous artists in residence, Aldwyth, called Cigar Box Encyclopedia (stay tuned for an exhibition sometime this fall.)

(Mark is at far right)

Mark celebrates with fellow ADF instructor Raphael Lopez-Barrantes

Mark gave a fantastic artist talk while he was here (so much so that his scheduled QiGong demonstration never happened) and talked about his dance career and inspirations and spoke in depth about a major work in process that will premier in March 2012 at On the Boards in Seattle that explores two very different approaches to the perception of the passage of time.

After having primarily visual artists in residence it was particularly fascinating to talk with Mark about his process and how much text and image were important in creating his movements.

Mark has a devilish sense of humor.  Not to be missed is his reinterpretation of Beyonce's Single Ladies video performed live at the festival in 2009.

We have a renewed appreciation for the incredible amount of time and effort that go into making a successful piece of choreography.  Thanks for everything Mark. We will really miss having you around here.

MOTEL 6

Back in 2000 I took a sabbatical from my job and spent 3 months travelling in Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. I was pretty serious about photography and shot a bunch of 35mm slide film along the way.  As it turned out the Motel 6 chain was in the process of renovating all of their motels in the West and every night I was staying in a different brand new Motel 6.  I started shooting the interiors and produced a series of photographs that I eventually framed and installed in the men's room at my office in downtown Durham. They had the characteristic sickly green tint of unfiltered fluorescent lights and became a celebrated permanent installation. Fastforward 11 years and I get a notice in the mail about a gallery in Charlotte that has put out an artist call for entry for NC photographers for a show called Eyes of Carolina.  The show was to be juried by the director of the NC Museum of Art Larry Wheeler.  I forwarded the notice to all of my photographer friends and my friend MJ dared me to enter the Motel 6 series. To my shock and delight my work was chosen along with 4 other talented NC photographers for a 3 month show at DOMA Gallery in Charlotte.  If you get to Charlotte check it out. Otherwise, here is the series!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enjoy.

Milestone and Cassilhaus.com

 

To celebrate our 25,000th visitor here at the Cassilhaus blog I finally decided to launch the Cassilhaus website. No graphic designers need fear for their jobs but it covers the basics of our residency, exhibition program, and has the requisite photos.  Take a look around and thanks to everyone for continuing to read my posts.

DOUG BEUBE

As usual I am a little late with this.  Doug Beube, a Canadian who hails from Brooklyn, was our resident artist back in April and May.

He was here for 7 weeks and boy did we learn alot about "bookarts".  We discovered Doug's work in a book I got Ellen for her birthday.  She is a super map geek and Katharine Harman's The Map as Art is dinner and dessert for a map geek.  It was like finding a whole new world of art. Doug is a mixed media artist and although his MFA is in photography, his prime focus currently is bookarts. Among other things he is the curator of a private collection in New York City entitled, The Allan Chasanoff Bookworks Collection: The Book Under Pressure and his time here at Cassilhaus was spent working on a commission for Mr. Chasanoff.  Doug was the first artist we invited who was a complete unknown to us and there was excitement and a bit of risk in that--fortunately he turned out not be a hamster strangler!

I have given up predicting what will and will not happen during residencies here but I must say zipper dyeing was not even on my radar.

In addition to dyeing the zippers Doug needed to shorten them by painstakingly removing metal teeth.

Doug did a piece for fellow Canadian artist k.d. Lang called The Many Lives of Miss Chatelaine which was one of his first to incorporate zippers as a low tech method of "cutting and pasting" sections of the "book" and allowing quick rearrangement.

When we first talked to Doug about coming to Cassilhaus he said he would need a shop with a dust capture system for his physical manipulation work on books.  We contacted our good friends at the UNC Art Department, Jim Hirschfield (chair) and Jeff Whetstone and they put us in touch with Pat Day at the UNC Art Lab which turned out to be a fabulous resource.  UNC has been a great collaborator for us with our residency.

In this particular project, Doug has placed a plastic "resist" at a certain point within the book and is grinding a large hole through the cover of the book and down into the pages. He will then begin to develop the interior content.  He has a fascinating method of developing a new narrative from the existing text of the book by highlighting certain words using painting and drawing.

 

Each section can now be moved around to change the narrative.

Doug gave a wonderful artist talk near the end of his stay where he showed works in progress and talked about his photographic, sculpture, and bookarts work.

The main thrust of what we are doing here at Cassilhaus is trying to engage the local arts community with our resident artists.  It was particularly exciting that Doug's talk connected us with a vibrant (and unknown to us) books arts scene in the Triangle and specifically a newly formed books arts group of artists, many of whom were in attendance. We are continually finding new constituencies that bring new energy to Cassilhaus.  Thanks Doug.

Only common things come when common sense prevails.                 --Anonymous

 

     

ARTS CREATE JOBS

Greetings!  I attended Arts Advocacy Day at the NC Legislature this year for the first time to try and keep our fine legislators from slashing arts funding.  We each got cool Arts Create Jobs buttons which I got a ton of comments on and when I inquired about getting a bumper sticker they said they didn't have them.  Now they do!  I printed these up.  Get yours free by sending a SSAE (#10 business envelope) to me at 6301 Mimosa Drive, Chapel Hill, NC  27514.  Let me know how many you want.  Cheers.  Let's cover the state with these and remind everyone how critical the arts are to our economy and our culture.

Cassilhaus Featured in Architectural Record

We just got the exciting news that Cassilhaus is featured this month in Architectural Record.  Check it out here.

Classics at Cassilhaus

It is hard to believe that we have never had a musical event at Cassilhaus but that has all changed now.  We were contacted by the Mallarmé Chamber Players and asked if we would do a house concert/fundraiser for them and it sounded incredibly cool. Named for 19th Century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé the group is a flexible ensemble of professional musicians based in Durham, North Carolina, whose mission is to enrich the lives of the community through outstanding chamber music.

We were a little bit worried about the acoustics because it is such a live space but fortunately we don't have a lot of parallel walls and the concert sounded fantastic.

We were lucky to have world class catering donated by Chef Theresa Fox and her team at the Art Insitute of Raleigh-Durham Culinary Program Really delicious!

The inestimable Shana Tucker, operations czarina, made everything run like clockwork.  Sorry I made you help me move the couch!

Board chair Beverly Meek gave introductions and shared the Mallarme story.

We had a delightful crowd of about 40.

Violinist Eric Pritchard

Violist Neil Leiter

Our cousin Madeline Sutter, a wonderful landscape architect (and big fan of chamber music) from Oriental NC joined us for the whole weekend and Ellen picked her brain about our garden.

Anne Parks speaks with creative director and violist Suzanne Rousso and French Hornist Rachel Niketopoulos

.

Ellen's friend John Bell.

Violinist Jeremy Preston and KidzNotes Executive Director Katie Wyatt.  Check out this amazing organization!

 

I must confess that I am not much of a classical music person but I really drank the KoolAid!  I am ready for the next concert.

 

 

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.   --Laurie Anderson

PHOTO SHOOT!!

Occassionally we get requests to use the house for photo shoots and it is a great way to supplement our income.  We had a request from a flooring manufacturer to use the house for two days a few weeks ago and we had a blast. Wonderful crew.  Here are a few snaps.  I don't know if we will ever see the finished product but it is for a national ad campaign.  Thanks so much to Laura, Greg, Kenny, and Rodney!

The bed looked so perfect after Kenny was done with the steamer we were afraid to sleep in it.

Ann Ehringhaus

6 months of the year we welcome artists into our home as Cassilhaus artists-in-residence.  We started our 2011 season on March 1 with wonderful artist and dear friend Ann Ehringhaus. Ann is an extraordinary artist/photographer, proprietress of Oscar’s House B&B on Ocracoke Island, Reiki Teaching Master, Minister, Healer, and all around amazing human. Both Ellen and I got to know Ann independently by staying at her B&B.  I have know her for probably 25 years.
 
Ann only had two weeks with us and it went by in a blur. She was at Cassilhaus to work on her current book project: Surviving the Fantasy: 13 Insights into (B&B) Happiness, and she shared a reading at the end of her stay. Since one of her main "survival" strategies has been self-care, she led us in exploring together some key acupressure points for body awareness and enhanced health.  Almost everyone in the crowd had stayed with Ann on Ocracoke and it was a moving evening of common experience.  The most frequent comment was that the book had a much more universal audience than the Bed and Breakfast community.  We understand there might be a few more insights added after her stay...Ann it was pure joy to have you here.

 
 

Our niece Erin (in blue) was visiting from St. Louis and got to experience some of her crazy Aunt and Uncle's life as well as explore Durham and Chapel Hill.

 

For in the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.

Baba Dioum

 

Appetite for Architecture

George Smart is a force to be reckoned with. Through his website Triangle Modernist Houses he has almost single handedly put moderist architecture on the map in the Triangle area and beyond.  One of George's zillion programs is one called Appetite for Architecture which allows anyone to share a meal with one of the Triangle's best modernist architects.  My lovely wife Ellen, principal of Ellen Cassilly Architect, participated for the second time this year and we held the event here at Cassilhaus.  It was an incredibly diverse group and we had a grand time.  We were joined by Leon Meyers who built the house. As usual Ellen outdid herself with a fabulous meal.

Connie Imboden

Back in 2000, just after I had started collecting photography, I went to my second ever photo collecting show called Photo LA in Los Angeles.  I was very green and pretty clueless about photography.  I went into one of the booths--the Gomez Gallery (no longer in business) because I was drawn to one of the images on the wall.  The woman in the booth asked me if I wanted to look at "the work".  I said sure and she brought out a big black portfoliio box filled with large black and white nudes shot in water. They were extraordinary and some so abstract that you couldn't tell what body part you were looking at. With each print she told me amazing background and stories and after a while I'm thinking to myself "man this women knows a scary amount about this artists' work" Finally I had to ask--"how is it that you know so much about this artist?"  "I am the artist" she said with a wry smile.  This was my introduction to Baltimore based artist Connie Imboden Connie has been exploring this nexus of light, water, flesh, reflection, and emotion for 30+ years. Much of the work is shot in her own black bottom swimming pool in her back yard.  I bought this extraordinary image, Dead Silences 1 (1988) that day.

After I got it framed I saw in vertically and I was so entranced that I put two picture hanging wires on the back so I could hang it in either orientation. It is completely different image!  I asked Connie about it and she said she does that with several of her images.

Fast forward 11 years.  I get a call from a photographer I know, Barbara Tyroler telling me her friend Connie Imboden was coming to the area to participate in a show at the FRANK Gallery in Chapel Hill and give a lecture at Through This Lens Gallery in Durham. She asked if she could bring Connie by to see Cassilhaus and reconnect.  I was thrilled.  We had such a wonderful visit.

(Barbara, me, and Connie)

 Connie's talk was very illuminating and well attended-a fabulous visit all around.

(Roylee Duvall-proprietor of Through this Lens, me, photograher Bill McAllister, Connie, photographer Caroline Vaughan) Photo courtesy of Kay Chernush. Spend some time on Connie's website.  It is a fascinating body of work.

   

 

The cure for anything is salt water--sweat, tears, or the sea.                                                                                                                                                                           Isak Dinesen

BLACK & WHITE

Ellen and I decided that we want to have one major exhibition a year in the gallery--likely in the fall.  It is a huge amount of work to mount a show so one major show feels about right.  We also have mini shows in tandem with our resident artists and the rest of the year we have our own photo collection on display. Our first Cassilhaus show with MJ Sharp in 2009 was an unqualified success and set a pretty high bar.  When we were brainstorming ideas for the 2010 show Ellen had a great idea.  We are members of the Friends of Photography (FOP) at the NC Museum of Art, a collectors group that helps support photography acquisition at the museum.  We take field trips to see members private collections and she said "so few people get to see these amazing collections--why don't we curate a show from our members' collections and put it up in the gallery?" I was immediately hooked.  I asked Huston Paschal, a former NCMA curator, dear friend, and fellow FOP member if she would put together the show with me and she enthusiastically (and perhaps foolishly) agreed.  We went to visit 10 private collections in the area and were BLOWN AWAY with the quality (and quantity) of work we encountered. We looked at well over 1000 photographs and quickly gleaned that we would have enough top quality work for 4 or 5 shows.  We decided to give our self some constraints to bring the number of pieces to a manageable number.  It was painful but first we eliminated color work and then we eliminated digital prints.  We were left with traditional black and white darkroom prints and even then it was painful to get down to the 74 prints that we ended up including in the show.  The prints were stunning and the list of photographers reads like a list of the medium's masters: Robert Adams, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, Bruce Davidson, Elliot Erwitt, Lee Friedlander, Andre Kertesz, Sally Mann, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Aaron Siskind, Frederick Sommer, Ralph Steiner, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Brett Weston to name just a few of the included artists. We were extremely pleased that regional photographers were so well represented in the collections we drew from including fantastic work by North Carolina's own  Frank Hunter, Elizabeth Matheson, David Simonton, and Jeff Whetstone. The entire checklist from the exhibition is available here. 

Here are a few installation shots.

We had a wonderful opening party in October and I regrettably forgot to take pictures.  I made up for it at the festive Black and White themed closing party!

Our 5 star catering team of Jeanne, Lynn, Renee, and Ellen spoiled us all. Ellen even invented a black and white appetizer.

 

Nice shoes Jefferson!!

Photographer David Simonton, featured in the exhibition, is clearly showing his preference for film.

World class photo tryptic Elizabeth Matheson, David Simonton, and Burk Uzzle.

Look carefully at Jim's shirt buttons!

My co-conspirator on this exhibition Huston Paschal with friends Guy and Mindy

 

I was terribly sad this week to see all this beautiful work go back to its owners.  I have become quite attached to some of these images.  We are very grateful to all of the generous lenders who made this exhibition possible.  We had over 650 people view the show incuding photo classes from Duke and UNC.  Now we have to start working on next year.......................

 

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.  ~Dorothea Lange

MILESTONE AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS

A few weeks ago we had our 20,000th visitor to this blog. Who would of thunk it! Thanks for visiting and everyone have a Happy Holiday!  Below is our candle lit Cassilhaus tree........

ALDWYTH

I am only about 4 months late with this post. Good thing I’m in charge! Our last artist resident for 2010 was Aldwyth. She is a phenomenal collage and bricolage artist based in Deer Island, SC who came to us by a lucky twist of fate.  We had another wonderful collage artist from Brooklyn booked for June and she had to cancel just a few months before coming.  I took Ellen on a surprise Valentines trip to Savannah and I asked our friend Mark Sloan, a frequent visitor and Director of The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, what we should see while there.  He told us we had to see the retrospective show he curated of Aldwyth’s work at the Jepson Center.  We were a tad embarrassed because the travelling show, Aldwyth: work v. / work n. - Collage and Assemblage 1991-2009 (spend some time on this site--it is amazing!), had premiered at the Ackland Art Museum in 2009 and we had missed it in our own backyard.  We were absolutely blown away-we had never seen anything like this show.  The work was extraordinary and Mark had done a brilliant job with the show and made it incredibly accessible.  We both knew immediately that we had to have Aldwyth come to Cassilhaus.

 

Mark had built this narrative about Aldwyth being a reclusive 74 year-old artist who lived totally outside the art world in a tree house on an island off the coast of South Carolina. We thought getting her to come was a long shot at best. Ellen and I agreed we would play up the privacy of the place and that she could be really isolated. Mark connected us and we hit it off immediately and she enthusiastically agreed to come for a residency.  We were not prepared for a gregarious, friendly, and open dynamo of a woman who knew more about art history and the art world than a room full of MOMA curators. It would appear that Mark can dabble in hyperbole on occasion. Aldwyth was like having another member of the family in the house and we had a ton of fun. Her only nod to reclusivity was that she didn’t like to be photographed.

 

We had learned a bit about her process at the show in Savannah but were very curious about what she might tackle during her time at Cassilhaus.  Some of her past collage projects have taken years to complete. During her residency, Aldwyth embarked on a project to produce a visual representation of the 2003 Mellon Lecture series delivered by curator Kirk Varnadoe during the last few months of his life and documented in the book Pictures of Nothing. It takes its name from a quip by Hazlitt about abstract art.  The series of 6 lectures covered the period of abstract art since Pollack.

 

To our surprise Aldwyth said she never used photocopies of anything-all of her collage work comes from original printed material. She had about 8 copies of the book and proceeded to cut them all up to pursue 3 or 4 completely different approaches to the work. Even at the end of her stay at Cassilhaus she had not yet decided on the final approach she would take with the piece.  She explored chronological and thematic approaches and every day brought a new configuration of images all over the floor and walls of the artist studio.

The only requirement we have of our visiting artists is that they do one thing during their stay—a small exhibition, an artist talk or lecture, a workshop, etc.-to engage the local arts community.  Aldwyth went above and beyond the call. She brought a good deal of her smaller 3D work with her to do a nice show in the gallery.

We also did our first ever collaboration with the Ackland Art Museum at UNC Chapel Hill with a conversation with Aldwyth and one of their curators as part of their Out of the Studio series.

The event also celebrated the Ackland's recent acquisition of the major Aldwyth work The World According to Zell.

 

The collage consists of thousands of images cut and meticulously assembled from a single volume of Zell's Encyclopedia.

We had a wonderful party after the talk and everyone got to see Aldwyth’s studio and the work in progress.

We miss Aldwyth dearly.  There was so much creativity and energy in the air while she was here. She really fulfilled the aspirations of our residency program. When asked to describe her stay she left us with this:

 

C – casual

A – adaptable

S – sensory

S – serendipitous

I – incredible

L – leisurely

H – hospitable

A – architectonic

U – unbelievable

S – SUBLIME

            --Aldwyth

 

 

 

AIA-T HOUSE TOUR

After almost 2 years living here there seems to be no let up in interest in seeing the house.  The Triangle Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA-T) decided to get in on the house tour craze with their first annual AIA Triangle Tour of Homes. In a juried selection process they chose 9 homes in the Triangle and this past Saturday we had about 150 visitors.  It was a truly beautiful day.

 

Super Ticket Taker Michele was here all day greeting our visitors.

Super docent Esther passed out the goodies at the end of the tour.  

Bill and Jeffrey, our shuttle drivers, each did a half day shift bringing folks from a local church parking lot.  This allowed groups of 4-10 ea to tour at at time and a really nice chance to get to actually talk to folks.

 

 

 

The Rule sisters and Ashley were 4 of our 20 docents.  Thanks you guys!

Ellen explaining the finer points of Cassilhaus' architectural features.  She met a number of new prospective clients.

I was bummed that I didn't get to see the other houses on the tour.  Check out the website above.  There is some fabulous design going on in the Triangle. 

MEALS FROM THE MARKET

Hello again.  Every year our good friends at Durham Central Park have a series of fund raising dinners called Meals from the Market which are the primary source of funding for expanding this amazing downtown oasis.  We had our event, a cocktail party for 65, this past Sunday and it was a smashing success.  Our friends Grace, Mary Jane, Morgan, and Renee were our co-hosts.  We dubbed it South by Northwest and had a compare and contrast of edible delights from North Carolina and the Pacific Northwest. We raised $3350.  Some photos from the festivities:

My sister Ann and her husband David were visiting from Virginia and helped with the prep the night before.

Sherry and Sue were our wildly capable bartenders.

 

Grace and Renee got creative with the drink menu. 

Ellen, Grace, Mary Jane, Renee, and Morgan put together quite a spread. Salmon from Washington State, cougar cheese and Washington state apples, Mary Jane's famous local deviled eggs, NC shrimp, Mebane raised Tilapia, assorted cheeses from the farmers' market, pickled okra and pickled sunchokes topped off with a goat cheese and fig tart.

We also had a blind champagne taste off between Biltmore Estates and Chateau St. Michele (Biltmore won)

 

 

 

Renee was the hostess with the mostest.

Morgan rockin the dishes.

 

You gotta love the Jesse Helms Tour Cancelled T-shirt

 

We are grateful to everyone who came to support Central Park and made it a very special evening at Cassilhaus. We even had a few farmers in the crowd.

WE'RE DONE!!!! (Deer Fence 3rd and final phase)

It has been a long haul but after 4 months and a ton of work we have finished our deer fence and HOPEFULLY we can start to do some planting without serving dinner for our deer friends. Details of the project are in the previous post. We spent several months off and on welding the 11 static panels and the gigantic gate door.

 

 

The ever wonderful Joe Galas at Monkey Bottom Studios where we fabricated the fence/gate helped us put together the huge gate by mounting the 4x4 steel post we would ultimately use on the site in his studio. (pardon the crappy cell phone pictures.  I forgot my camera)

Here's Joe installing one of the hinges.

We bailed on torch cutting the verticals and had our good friends at Vega Metals cut them with their computer driven water jet cutter.  Boy that was a no brainer--only wish we had come to our senses earlier.  Ellen had to draw the jagged line in CAD so we would still get the "random" edge we wanted. 

We scavenged some old rebar from our house construction and welded two pieces on each static section to hold it in the concrete.

 

A few weekends ago we rented a trailer and brought all the parts of our creation home.

Here's the finished gate.  It is a pivot gate and is hinged about 1 foot in from the end and mounted on a 12' 4x4" steel pole set in concrete. Note the height change on the bottom left to accommodate the step up at the rock wall.

 

I painted the bottoms of the static pieces that would be underground with a metal primer.

 

We knew to get the accuracy we wanted on the installation that we were going to have to find a professional to help us.  I did the math on the number of bags of cement I was going to have to mix and the concrete truck was looking pretty sweet.  After asking for referrals we got connected to Peter Yeganian at Mulberry Restoration and he and his crew (Steven, Cappy(sp?), and Travis) did a fabulous job in just two days.  Using a Bob Cat with a giant auger they made a large trench on either side of our cattle grates, set and braced the gate post and static pieces, and then did the concrete pour and voila--deer fence!

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

We gave the concrete a day to firm up and then Joe showed up on Saturday with his new portable welder to weld all of the horizontal connecting pieces between each of the static sections so it looks like a continuous fence. I also spent half the day going around the entire perimeter of the plastic fence and making absolutely sure the rest of the fence was sealed.  I repaired some tears where deer had broken through and added ground stakes where they had dug under the fence. I sprayed deer repellent at strategic spots and felt pretty good about the integrity of the fence.  I got a wicked case of poison ivy as thanks for my efforts.

 

 

 

It took all three of us to wrestle the gate in place and get the hinges set and welded.

 

 

We didn't do a detailed engineering analysis on the gate and were worried that it would sag.  Check out the grin on Ellen when she opens the gate for the first time with one finger and it is smooth as glass and perfectly level.

The last step was to weld 4 horizontals on the last static unit with just enough clearance to allow the gate to swing.  I had to do some last minute "trimming"

We are very happy with the final product.  There are some things we wish we had known at the beginning that we know now but it is enormously satisfying to do a project like this on your own and see it manifested after 4 long months.  Ellen's design is brilliant.  We wanted the fence to be as transparent as possible and when you are on axis to it it almost goes completely away.  We have found a recipe on the web to accelerate the rusting process and that will make it even more invisible as the main thing we are seeing now are the shiny pieces that haven't rusted at all.

 

 

 

It's been fun the last few days to see how the light catches it at different times of the day.

   

We hope the deer admire it--from the outside.

I am glad I did it, partly because it was well worth it, and chiefly because I shall never have to do it again.

                                                      -- Mark Twain

 

DEER FENCE PHASE TWO

In my last deer fence post I detailed our plan for the deer fence at Cassilhaus.  We have finished all of the plastic fencing including ground stakes and and cabling at the top of the fence as well as the three access gates.  The last piece is the decorative steel fence at the driveway on either side of the cattle grates.  My intrepid wife Ellen is determined that we can make it ourselves which is a good thing because we can't afford to have someone else make it. As a bonus she looks pretty hot in her welding suit.

    

Frank not so much.

She came up with a beautiful design where we rough cut verticals out of 3/16" plate steel that are 8' tall and vary from 3-6" wide in a random way.  We are using an acetylene torch to cut them and it is slow going but we really like the edge we are getting. This is one of the rare times when low skill level leads to a superior product!

 

Ellen calls the look Giacometti meets tree bark.

Our dear (deer?) friend Renee is graciously letting us use here studio and giving us sage advice on all things metal.

 

We plan to group the verticals in groups of 4 and weld them to steel channel.  This makes them manageable in weight and size and allows us to account for grade changes when we bury them in the ground.  We will weld rebar to the bottoms of the channel to go down deeper in the concrete for stability.

 The spacing on the verticals is 6 inches and we are using cut pieces of 1/2" rod in a randomly spaced pattern as horizontals which give stability and keep the deer from sliding through.  We are putting more horizontals toward the bottom.

 We are using a grinder to clean up the welds and to take the sharpness off the edges of the verticals.

It took us the better part of 3 solid days to cut 9 verticals (1 4x8 sheet), all the horizontals, weld one section, and do all the grinding.  We decided to bring our prototype unit home to see how it looked in place.

 

We love it and are achieving our goal of near invisibility when you are looking at it on axis as you come in the driveway.

 

We are now looking at ways to speed up the process a little as the thought of making 9 more of these plus a gate makes me age a little.  Thanks again to Renee for all of her help.

 

  
  

MARIE NAVARRE

We could not have imagined how much joy our artist in residence program would bring.  We are having a GREAT time sharing our home and lives with such wonderful people and amazing creative energy. Our artist for the month of May, Marie Navarre, hails from Tempe, AZ and is a photographer and mixed media artist who creates subtle and intricate assemblages using photographs, paper, and found objects.  Her recent work is informed by her interest in poetry, especially Haiku, and the concepts of time, impermanence, and pure experiencing of the present moment. She uses traditional film and darkroom chemistry but that is were the traditional part ends.  Marie gathers images like other artists gather raw materials--she is not making images in the way other photographers try to catch a magical landscape or defining portrait.  She photographs out of need to do so and never has a subject or final piece in mind. She prints her work on clear 16x20" film.  Piles of contact sheets and hours/days/weeks of staring and shuffling around give birth to magical connections and concepts.  Sometimes photographing, enlarging, and rephotographing is next followed by sewing film to paper and collaging until a piece emerges that translates one sense to another or captures the essence of feeling.

Marie Navarre dream of Buson   film, thread, ink on paper (click to enlarge)

2003 Courtesy Lisa Sette Gallery 

We have only one requirement of our visiting artists and that is that they do something to interact with and share with our local community.  This can take the form of a workshop, gallery show, artist talk, or a public community event. Marie took this on with gusto by offering to do 3 things to share with us here--a workshop for photographers about her process, a beginning Zen meditation workshop, and a mini gallery show and artist talk for a broader audience.

 

Ellen and I met Marie through her work.  We fell in love with one of her pieces--Seeing the Song--at a photo show in 2006 which led us to her gallerist Lisa Sette which led to a wonderful friendship and going to Lisa's wedding and getting to know Marie! 

Marie Navarre  seeing the song 2004 film sewn on paper

The Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale was kind enough to ship 4 of Marie's framed pieces for our little show.  Marie also has three works in progress from her time at Cassilhaus and these along with our piece made a nice show of eight works.

 

 

We learned so much at the workshop.  My appreciation of an artist's work goes up exponentially when I get to hear first hand about their process and inspirations and the stories that come up around specific pieces.

 

 

 

I regret I didn't take any photos at her opening but a great time was had by all. She called the show incurable details which is a fragment of a title of one of her earlier pieces. 

Let us not be accused of being entirely about the visual arts here at Cassilhaus.  Last weekend a small group of us had an orientation to Zen Buddhism and meditated in the gallery followed by walking meditation outside. One of Marie's other lives is as a Buddhist nun and she is deeply involved in the Zen center in Tempe.The energy keeps getting better here!

 
NC is such a change for her from the dessert. She is like a kid with her first camera shooting all the wonderful green trees and the rain storms.  We hope there will be lots of bits of NC showing up in her work in the coming years as she assimilates all she has taken in here. She introduced us to a poem by Wallace Stevens called Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird and here is a small excerpt:

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

She says she is focusing these days on that moment just after.

Marie is a delight to be with and we have become fast friends.  The month is zooming by and we are taking her to Ocracoke Island, NC this weekend to show her that you actually can see the horizon line in NC.

 

MILESTONE

Last week we had our 15,000th visitor to the Cassilhaus Blog.  Thanks to all of our readers! 

 

Patrick Dougherty Walkabout

Just trying to catch up here.  We had a wonderful week finishing up the Patrick Dougherty piece.  With incredible help from our dear friend James, Ellen's mother Anita, my sister Barbara, and Ellen we got done a week early.  Patrick was very open to suggestions and the piece evolved very organically.  On the second day we got pretty far down the road with a large extension of the piece in our bedroom and we decided on day 3 that it was too much and we took out a big section of it (in the transom) and now we have the worlds largest Christmas wreath!

 

After we finished up the main piece above the dining canopy Patrick turned his attention to the piece at the entry landing.  The original plan was for the left side of the big swirl in the living room to go up into the upstairs hall, over the top of the main stairwell, down into the slot in the floor in the library and through the entry to the landing. After playing with this for quite a while we all decided it was just too literal and it would overwhelm the space.  Patrick started playing with ways for different parts of the piece to simply "point" at each other and make more figurative connections. We wanted the piece to interact with the railing done by Marc Maiorana and I was a little skeptical how Patrick was going to be able to get a substantial enough mass at the landing without any attachment points.  He quickly allayed my fears and made an amazing form by using very long saplings and wedging the sticks against the rail and the paneling for a VERY sturdy foundation. 
  

 

    

 

The aftermath was a little scary.  It looked like a bomb went off in the house.

  
Because we finished early and had a ton of saplings left Patrick suggested that Ellen, James, and I make our own sculpture.  We were completely game.  He said he often starts with beginners by making a sort of stick base wall and then building on that.  He had us go in the carport and just start weaving sticks over and under to make a "wall" that was about 8'x17'.

 
Patrick asked us what we wanted to do with our creation and my first notion was to use it as part of our deer fence and so the four of us carted it out by the driveway to put it into place.  i thought it looked fabulous and Ellen completely vetoed it so we decided to put it against the north wall of the carport and it was like it was made for the space!  Exactly the right length.  We then got to work weaving our spirals while Patrick looked on quite amused.

 

our friend Cici showed up and joined in the fun.

 

 

Patrick was feeling pretty good about his job security but we were pretty proud of our efforts.

Our filmmaker friends Kenny and Penelope who are making a documentary about Patrick called Bending Sticks were on hand to film all the activity and while we were joking around Penelope came up with the suggestion of naming the main piece inside Walkabout and everyone agreed that was a great name.  Here are some images of the finished piece--

 

 

 

Note the section that comes through the opening in the wall in the bedroom at the rear of the image.

 

 

 

Many many thanks to all of our helpers and especially to Patrick for bring this singularly wonderful creation into our home which we will enjoy for many many years.
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
  

Patrick Dougherty Day 1

Our April artist in residence is North Carolina based sculptor Patrick Dougherty.  Check out his site here.  We are very excited that he is doing a piece in our house and we started today.  Patrick works with sticks, mostly maple saplings, and we spent a few days last week with Patrick gathering in local forests with help from Ellen's whole office and other project volunteers.

 

Esther and Keith gather a bundle.

 

We filled up a pick up and a Uhaul trailer on day 1 and we had quite a beautiful day.  Our legs were not so beautiful after some really dense briars.

 

James, our project foreman, starts a stack of bundles in our front yard.

 

 

The guy at the scaffolding rental place had some trouble wrapping his brain around the bizarre configuration I requested to go over top our dining canopy and it came in 100 pieces without instructions so it took me the better part of two days to assemble with the only casualty being a brutally expensive Italian light fixture--ouch!

 

We went into major house protection mode in the morning.

 

 
We are working with filmmakers Kenny Dalsheimer (documenting our cat Fripp) and Penelope Maunsell to make a movie about Patrick's work and have been filming his recent installations including the monumental one at the new NCMA building and an installation on Main Street in Rock Hill SC.  Thanks to Zan Maddox for the amazing images on the Gallery Up blog.  Kenny and Penelope starting filming at our place this morning and set up two time lapse cameras. Here Penelope and lighting guru Keith set up the first of the time lapse units which takes one frame every two minutes.

 

We wanted to give Patrick a grid to attach his initial base sticks to so we devised a system of eye bolts screwed into studs and aircraft cable.

 

Patrick started weaving sticks about 1 pm and made amazing progress.

 

Our stick debudding and quality control team consisted of James, my sister Barb, and Ellen's mother Anita.  Barb and Anita came to town for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and decided to stay on to work with Patrick.

 

 

We spent a good bit of time talking with Patrick about exactly how the piece would look.  We have a crazy plan of having it wind throughout the house. Patrick advises that sticks often have a mind of their own and decide where they will go and what the final outcome will be.  We are very happy with the results for the day.

 

 

 
 STAY TUNED!
 

  
 
 
 

 
 

 
  
 

DEER FENCE PHASE ONE

Even though a lot of folks in our neighborhood have big deer fences, we thought we could get by without one by using deer resistant plants and some non=barrier methods of deer repellant. We got a few plants as gifts when we moved in and the deer ate everything.  It became clear before long that we really weren't going to be able to have much of a landscape or garden at all without one. We took some solace in the fact that we are next to 1600 acres of Duke Forest and were reducing the deer's range by less than an acre. 

We really didn't want a big driveway fence in front of the house and our landscape guy Mark Moldenhauer recommended using cattle guards doubled up back to back in the driveway with a fence up to the edge so the deer were unlikely to jump them.  We formulated a plan of using 7' "invisible" black mesh fence from Benners Gardens on the South, East, and West sides of the house back in the woods so it would not be seen.  We are hopeful that the North slope behind the house is steep enough that the deer won't come up from the water. We have selected 3 locations for people gates to keep access to the paths that people use on our property plus we need to design a nicer looking fence/gate to come up the edge of the cattle grates (phase II).

We found some great reasonably priced cattle guards made of concrete and rebar from Smith- Carolina and hired Mark Moldenhauer to put them in.  His guys did a beautiful job.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To the left in the photo above will be a people gate and on both sides we will design a more decorative fence that will go to the first big tree and then the mesh fence will pick up from there around the house.

Theories put forward so far as to what the things are in our driveway include "grates to clean off the car tires" all the way to scales.  And of course those who don't know the plan ask "well won't the deer just walk around them?"  Our standard retort to those who ask whether the cattle gaurds are working is "do you see any cows in the yard?" 

The "invisible" fence really is just that.  From about 20 feet away in the woods you can't see it at all.  We have put white surveyors tape on it so the deer don't run into it.

 

Over the past two months Ellen and I have installed 1000' of the fence plus a run of heavy nylon cord above the fence to attach it to with cable ties and hopefully prevent damage from fallen limbs.

 .
With one exception where we had to install a pole in the ground, all of the fence runs from tree to tree.  We found some heavy duty ground stakes (in Ellen's holster) to keep deer and other animals from burrowing under the fence.

This past Sunday we installed our first gate.  It also came from Benners and is basically just two poles sunk into the ground and a metal frame with hinges covered with the same fencing material we used elsewhere.

 
 

Success can eliminate as many options as failure.     --Tom Robbins