Cassilhaus

JOHN ACORN SCULPTURE EXHIBITION

John Acorn during his artist talk at Cassilhaus

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

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

pieces from the camouflage man series

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

 

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

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

 

 

 

Frank Hunter

Frank in the Cassihaus artist apartment washing prints

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

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

rear view

front view

 

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

HORSE & BUGGY PRESS 20TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

 

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

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

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

The exhibition looked magnificent.

And the crowds were enthusiastic.

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

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

 

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

--Franz Kafka

 

 

 

 

 

LOVE VALLEY

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

 

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

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

Initial layout of all elements with old exhibition still hanging.

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

Michaela fabricating the shelf for the video installation.

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

This background from her exhibition text--

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

The opening was a smash.

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sohei Nishino

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

 

        

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

 

Click to enlarge any of the photographs

 

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

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

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

 

Arigato Sohei

 

 

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

 

Actual Size

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

    

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

Ralph Steiner  Clothesline  1925  Gelatin Silver Contact Print

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

 

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

 

14 of the Steiner prints were hung together.

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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