Cassilhaus

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 Welty

Our final artist of the 2012 season was Gloucester, MA based conceptual multi-media artist Rachel Perry Welty. Born in 1962, in Tokyo, Japan, Welty 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, Welty 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. Welty 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 Welty 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 Welty)

 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 Welty

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