Cassilhaus

MUNMUN Man

 

I first became aware of Jesse Andrews in June 2015 at the Nantucket Film Festival.  Ellen and I were visiting our niece and nephew on the island and we had heard some great buzz about the film Me and Earl and Dying Girl. We adored the film at the Festival screening and afterwards there was a Q & A with the New York Times bestselling author and film's screenwriter Jesse Andrews. Love at first sight (or first hear!)  Ellen and I almost immediately birthed the idea of having a screenwriter come to the residency at Cassilhaus. Our initial overtures were spurned by a flippant, if adorable, auto-email reply about being in a remote Chilean fishing village that suggested contacting his publisher if we really had something interesting to talk about. We had moved on when about 15 months later out of the blue an excited and slightly contrite Jesse contacted us about coming to the remote writing village of Chapel Hill at the beginning of 2017 to complete his latest novel--he was over the moon about his first draft and his publisher had a large gun to his head and the stars were ripe for alignment.

The initial timing was not going to work as I was just about to embark on my sabbatical journey but I moved things around a bit and we had our first-ever artist in January. Jesse is both a novelist and screenwriter and writes primarily YA (Young Adult) Fiction--a category I didn't even know existed until his arrival. He comes with a lot of YA energy!  He was super focused and disciplined while he was here and a marvel to watch.  I had never had the pleasure to watch a novelist work up close in real time and I was just flabbergasted to see Jesse bound over to our side of the house literally jumping up and down exclaiming something on the order of "you won't believe what just happened at the end of the chapter. You just won't believe it!  I never could have imagined he would do that" Like some third party observer he was watching the characters HE created shock and surprise him. It was raw joy.

Jesse was so generous with the community while he was here. When we invite an artist in a new medium to Cassilhaus we are always astonished at the new constituencies that we discover and engage.  We had no idea of how robust the screenwriting community was in the Triangle and Jesse was open to working with a number of the local screenwriting classes. We made the acquaintance of well know screen writer Gary Hawkins who was right under our nose teaching at The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and he agreed to moderate a discussing around adapting a novel for the screen following a screening of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl at the Full Frame Theater.

 

 

I don't think I've even know someone who was almost unable to speak without their hands.  Talking is a full body sport for Jesse.

The novel Jesse came to finish is called MUNMUN and it was published last April. MUNMUN takes place in an alternate reality a lot like our own, except everyone is proportional in size to how much money they have. Warner and his sister Prayer have none, and so they're about the size of rats, which is not just demeaning, but dangerous: day and night they face mortal dangers that bigger richer people don’t ever have to think about. Warner and Prayer know their only hope is to scale up, but how can two littlepoors survive in a world built against them? Read the first few pages here!

 

Just before he left Jesse asked if he could do a reading from his book for a small group of friends and it was a wonderful intimate evening.  It was the first time he had read from the new book in public.

 

Many of our visiting artists bond with our cats Jaco and Joni but Jesse had a particularly tight connection with Jaco. This is one of my favorite photos from his time with us having an existential conversation with Cassilkitty #1.

 

Thank you Jesse for opening up your world to us.  It was a really fun ride.

 

 

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

—Elmore Leonard

 

 

 

EXQUISITE CORPSE

 

I am more than a year behind on these posts so I am going to cheat a little bit and draw from my wife Ellen's text from the gallery guide for the first exhibition she solo curated at Cassilhaus Gallery called Exquisite Corpse.

Exhibition ideas often organically present themselves. In 2016 our friend Diana Gaston, the Executive Director of the Tamarind Institute, a fine art press in Albuquerque, New Mexico, let us know about a portfolio of eighteen lithographic prints from her press entitled Exquisite Corpse. Over a period of fifteen years, Tamarind visiting artists waiting “on press” to finish their main editions were invited to participate in a game of exquisite corpse by creating renderings of heads, torsos, or legs without knowledge of what other collaborating artists were producing.We were entranced and added the prints to our collection. The moment they arrived I knew we needed to do a show.

Exquisite Corpse (or, Cadavre Exquis) was a Surrealists’ parlour game in which players write or draw in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of their writing or drawing, and then pass it on to the next player for a further contribution.The name is derived from one round of the game that resulted in the nonsensical phrase, Le cadaver exquis boira le vin nouveau,“The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.” Since its beginning, artists, as well as writers, have drawn from the concept of the game to create collaborative and fantastical drawings, poetry, and prose.

The Tamarind portfolio is a variant of the game and inspired me to mine our own collection to unearth hidden “corpses" for this 2017 exhibition. The Cassilhaus Collection is portrait heavy and I was able to look at each piece with fresh eyes. It was a delightful challenge to find correlations and juxtapositions, in content, tone, and form to create full sets that force us to look again at familiar images with new meaning. Needless to say the artists were not complicit in this activity!

I use this great collection software called Recollector to keep track of our art collection and one of its features is to be able to do extensive subsetting and to print very flexible reports.  Ellen and I went through the collection to select possible pieces for inclusion in the exhibition, I printed her a custom report, and then she started the fun of pairing the pieces into exquisite corpses.

When I set out to hang the 18 piece portfolio we wanted them to "float" off the wall rather than use conventional framing and we wanted to use magnets so as not to damage the pieces themselves.  It took about three trips to Home Depot to find just the right combo of hardware and super strong magnets to pull it off.

Groupings ranged from 2-5 pieces with most being pretty literal but several were quite abstracted. It was a ton of fun to get reacquainted with these works in these crazy new contexts. You can download the Gallery Guide to check out all of the combinations. Download Exquisite+Corpse+Gallery+Guide(1)

Ellen gave a short curator's talk at the opening and had set up a "make your own exquisite corpse" station in advance in the Girl Power Room encouraging everyone to participate and add their work to the dedicated guest exhibition area and riff off other visitors.

Also in the Girl Power room for this exhibition was a very small show of the work of collaborative artists Mercedes Jelenek and Jess Rees. It was a wonderful complement to the exhibition theme.  Again Ellen from the guide:

While in the planning stages of this show we visited The Penland School of Crafts in western North Carolina and discovered the collaborative work of Mercedes Jelinek and Jess Rees. Their ‘conversations,' as they call them, start with scouting and visiting locations together. Mercedes then makes a series of images and sends a selection of printed photographs to Jess to choose from. Jess and Mercedes continue to pass the photos back and forth, now beginning to remove parts of the images and adding new details in their own ways.The resulting photographs have many layers of acrylic paint to conceal parts of the photo, as well as gold leaf additions to bring attention to particular architectural elements left within the frame. This volleying continues until both are satisfied with the final print—creating a different sort of exquisite corpse.

(Jess and Mercedes at the opening)