Elizabeth Bick’s first body of work, begun in 2003, depicted Spiritualist churches in New Orleans and was essentially documentary photography.[1]  “This series marked my beginning as a real photographer and as an artist.  This was the first body of work I did” that was not a student project, she says.  “It still greatly informs my work—I was photographing moments of divine possession, at the time.”  But she realized the camera could transform a subject or a space in the same way a spirit transformed the person it possessed.  “The idea of creating a “higher reality” through the camera” continues to motivate her.  Today she makes pictures that present a cinematic interpretation of her life and the lives of her subjects.  Narrative is created organically through gesture, light and staging, though, not through the technology of the post-production process. “I use Photoshop for printing, but that’s it,” she says.  “I don’t want to use it in a dishonest way.”

The Truth in the Light (2005)

In 2005, Bick lost her studio, job and belongings in New Orleans in Hurricane Katrina, bringing her series on Spiritualist churches to an end.  She received an emergency grant to start anew in New York City, where she was housed in a shared loft with other displaced artists. She also had fellowships in Paris and Santa Fe; traveled through northern India; worked for two years in the south of England; and finally came to New Haven, where she is pursuing an MFA at Yale.  She still makes the bulk of her work in New York, however, and she keeps an apartment on Grand Street in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she stays with two roommates when working in the city.

Bick says the primary emphasis of the Yale program is to “find out who you really are as an artist and how your personal story motivates you in your work.  They want you to forget about wanting your pictures to “look” a certain way or about trying to make work that’s going to be popular.”  While her tumultuous post-Katrina years have transformed her work and her life, Bick’s graduate studies have helped her see that her childhood continues to exert a strong influence on her work and her world-view.  She described one critique panel at Yale where a professor asked her if she used to be a dancer after looking at her portraiture, which surprised her, since he had no knowledge of her ballet background.

Double Walkers and Casting Calls

Bick spent her formative years in Houston. Her father traveled abroad extensively for work, and Bick describes her daily home life with her mother and older, twin sisters as “matriarchal.” She attended an all-girls school and devoted herself to classical ballet for 14 years. As a result, her childhood universe was almost exclusively female–nurturing and sheltered, but also competitive and conformist.

The classical ballet world reveres conformity and physical homogeneity.  The ballet masters push dancers to achieve a strict ideal form in their bodies, and the dancers in the corps de ballet traditionally wear identical costumes, their hair and make-up intended to create an impression of sameness.  This ideal of homogeneity was reinforced by Bick’s older, twin sisters, always high-achieving and beautiful, her primary role models growing up.  “Undoubtedly two significant figures during my formative years were my identical twin sisters,” admits Bick.  “My introverted demeanor has been overpowered by a desire to investigate this form of pattern recognition in my works.”

Bick has focused on female subjects, especially ones that resemble her or other female subjects she finds, in her portraiture. “In my photographic life, I am always searching for women who look like other women found through chance encounters.  I have found identical twin sisters, women who look like me who are also named Elizabeth, and people who look like other people I know,” she wrote recently on the arts website Undercoat.  The artist concedes that her “Double Walker” (the literal English translation of Doppelgänger) series also speaks to a basic human urge to find others in the world with whom we closely identify.

Her current series, Casting Calls, is a more thorough exploration of the photographer’s search for a subject and their ensuing relationship as artistic collaborators.  Unlike most photographers, she is not only documenting the stage of her project wherein she chooses a subject, but will also include these photographs in the completed project as an integral part of the work.  The portrait photographer’s process of choosing a subject is usually a “black box.”  The viewer simply takes the subject in a portrait as a given, and in Bick’s eyes, this privileges photographers unduly over their subjects, or “performers,” to use Bick’s preferred term. (Bick has almost as much disdain for the term “model” as she does for the casually violent term “shoot”—so let’s stop any talk of “shooting models!”) Once Bick finds her performer/ collaborator, she will allow that person’s biography to dictate the pictures they create together. For now, her “Casting Calls” series gives viewers a glimpse into a portraitist’s creative process.

Casting Calls (2012)

Texas, New York Street Scenes and Beatification

By the time she started her M.F.A. program, Bick had spent a few years making pictures in a narrative style, engaging in a voyeurism that consisted of photographing strangers (found in New York on Craig’s List, through chance encounter, or by picking up discarded scraps of paper in the subway and using any contact information she found on them) and allowing them to project their personal stories into her images.  “Indulging in scopophilia [by] photographing the world allows for an exploration of new places and people, adapting my photographic vision to new surroundings,” Bick explains.  Like many contemporary photographers, she is a shy person who uses the camera as a tool to facilitate her interaction with the outside world; she takes her use of the camera a step further by using photographs as a way to create a more “ordered” and livable version of the world around her.

The themes and qualities of Bick’s work that are influenced by ballet extend beyond femininity and pattern recognition.  Performance, gesture and the idea of the stage are central themes in her work.   Bick began to incorporate these elements into her work more consciously after her Yale instructor recognized a dance aesthetic in her work.  “Coming of age as a disciplined student of ballet, I learned to be a witness to the artistic movements of others both in and out of the stage. I could escape my mundane existence through my “choreographed” version of reality, either as a ballerina or as an observer. Since I have retired from dance and pursued my passion for photography, I have learned the stage can exist in my pictures as it did in my past.”

Texas (2011), a foreboding parking-lot scene photographed outside a derelict shopping mall in Houston, Texas, could be the setting for a modern-day film noir.  “I used to stare out the car window at that mall every day for years, before I became a photographer,” Bick says.  The photograph is separated into two striking parts: heaven and earth, with a glorious, golden sky shining above the paved-over, man-made world, hinting that something wondrous may in fact hide behind the garage door marked “ENTRANCE.”  Such is the case in Hollywood and New York, where dazzling stage sets and sound stages are housed in bleak warehouses in tough neighborhoods.   “This picture marks the beginning of my creating the idea of a stage in my pictures,” says Bick.  It also captures a time when Bick was struggling to survive as an artist in New York.  Her new surroundings were harsh and ugly compared to La Dolce Vita of New Orleans.  At her lowest point, she suffered panic attacks every time she rode the subway.  But she used her camera to make something “more ordered” out of her gritty industrial neighborhood, just as she used the stage and ballet to create romance and drama in her mundane, sheltered childhood.  “I think my work cured me of my agoraphobia,” Bick says.

Texas (2011)

In New York Street Scene I and II, scenes of pedestrians are arranged in a grid that suggests both the density of urban living and a series of cinematic film cells, or perhaps, to some viewers, a ballet stage.[2]  The sameness of the pedestrians’ movements in the daylight grid is a testament to a pattern recognition that comes from years of performing and watching synchronized, choreographed pieces.  The night scenes were inspired by finding spaces that looked (by chance) stage-lit.  The pictures struck one of her instructors as “a therapeutic exercise for an agoraphobic”—another uncanny critique, since the person giving it had no knowledge of Bick’s panic attacks.

New York Street I (2012)

New York Street II (2012)

Dramatic movement and gesture always find their way into her pictures, as she choreographs her subjects’ movement in various ways.  In her Beatification series of street portraits (not included in the exhibition), Bick uses a basic gesture, along with the sun, to unify a disparate group of subjects.  “The photographs are [mainly] of women who have lived in East Williamsburg and Bushwick for the last 30 years or more, pre-gentrification. All images are taken on Grand Street, the same street I live. We walk up and down this commercial street daily together. They were all stopped briefly and asked to look up at the sun, and close their eyes if they’d like,” wrote the artist recently on the website Undercoat.  While Bick uses the street as her stage and the sun as lighting for showcasing the dramatic gesture of her subjects, her cast—in striking contrast to the strictures of the ballet world, or the world of commercial photography—is the “regular cast of characters” on the street in an industrial, working-class section of Brooklyn, appearing in the pictures as they appear in their everyday lives.

From Beatification series (2012)

Island

At a Yale summer institute in Norfolk, Connecticut this summer, Bick was an instructor for undergraduate art majors.  The summer institute was an extremely insular artists’ colony.  “We called it The Island,” Bick says.  The Norfolk “Island” had many strictures—the demands placed on the instructors were all but impossible, and neither students nor instructors were allowed to leave the premises without permission.  But in the artist’s pictures, “I was thinking of an all-female, non-dystopian version of Lord of the Flies.  You’re away from normal society, and things like your shoes and your clothes just don’t matter anymore.”  Bick idealized the setting, too.  While the institute was bucolic, “that place didn’t look like that!” says Bick.  “I created an imaginary place by making those pictures.”

Island II (2012)

Island V (2012)

Island VIII (2012)

The imaginary place pictured in Island recalls utopian ideals of the mother of Bick’s closest childhood friend.  This woman, herself an artist (Bick calls her “her artist mother”), often said that “in an ideal world, we could all run around barefoot, and no one would have to wear a bra,” and everyone could feel completely unfettered in their creativity.  Instead of reverting to savagery and violence like the boys in Lord of the Flies, the all-female utopian society of Island (also a fiction, as the institute was coed) is, like the artist’s childhood world, a safe, nurturing and creative place, minus the pressure to conform or be perfect.

Bick uses the camera to reconcile the outside world she has experienced since leaving New Orleans—which offers romance, drama and even spiritual enlightenment alongside alienation, anxiety and danger—with the nurturing, yet stifling, cocoon of her sheltered youth. Image making, Bick says, gives her the opportunity to create a “personal mythology” out of her existence, “where imagination constantly challenges reality.”

-Margaret Browne, September 2012

Molzahn’s statement:  “You can see my love of natural elements, form and color in my designs. Each piece is a one-of-a-kind statement of wearable art. I view art as a force in everyday life and hope I inspire you to incorporate it into your own.”  Amen!

Necklace: African opal, wood, agate, sterling silver.

Necklace: faceted agate, wood, sterling silver.

Necklace: resin coral bead, black coral, red jasper, rock crystal, glass, suede, sterling

Necklace: lapis, African brass beads

Necklace: vintage Lucite, white jade, Czech glass, sterling silver.

Necklace: Red spiny oyster shell, Arizona turquoise, Mayan jade, antique Sudanese trade beads

My gallery is open!  Here’s our ad for the June 2012 issue of the Highlands-Cashiers Laurel and the 2012 Season Program for the Highlands-Cashiers Chamber Music Festival.  Shown in the ad is the work of Winton and Rosa Eugene (pottery), Ab the Flagman (wooden eagle sculpture), Michael Hatch (glass “firewater jugs”), Mark Sillay (woodturning) and Kristi Hyde (jewelry). Shot and laid out by Gil Stose.

Chivaree Southern Art & Design is located on Hwy. 107 North just a couple hundred yards from the Cashiers Crossroads in the Cashiers Commons shopping center, next to Zoller’s Hardware.  We are open Mon- Sat, 10-5 and by appointment.  You can find us on the web(we’ll have artworks for sale soon on our website) and on Facebook.

On our way from Atlanta back to Highlands, Gil and I stopped to visit Al Garnto at his studio/home/sculpture garden in Blairsville, GA.  Al is a North Georgia mountain guy, born and bred, and he is also an alumnus of the Atlanta College of Art (now part of SCAD).  I was first introduced to him at Steve Slotin’s FolkFest by a fellow art collector, John Denton.  His specialty is outdoor sculpture, but he also does beautiful work in collage, incorporating architectural remnants from old buildings and found objects from the buildings’ environs.  They are meditations on place and memory in the rural South.

A collage of the Union County (GA) Courthouse, incorporating tile discarded when the building was renovated.

another collage--Al says this one is about his dyslexia.

Al has small versions of some of his outdoor kinetic sculptures in his yard, but the biggest display of them can be found at Meeks park, just a couple miles from his house in Blairsville.  Here’s my favorite one, Country Calder.  It’s all made of reclaimed materials like barn wood and rusted sheet metal.

Al and Gil standing in front of "Country Calder," with Al's highly decorated studio in the background

He uses mostly recycled materials in his sculptures.  His latest project involves salvaging bicycles from anywhere he can find them and creating sculptures out of them.  Some of them are inspired by taxidermy:

Some are just inspired by bicycles:

More indoor sculptures:

All the plaques in the background here are probably from Al’s illustrious athletic past.  He is a former tennis pro, and he ran track at the intercollegiate level.  His studio is full of trophies.  I think he also may have been a competitive swimmer?  He and Gil were talking about swimming a lot.  How I ended up surrounded by jocks like this, I will never know.

"This is just a Zen piece. The owner can rearrange the rocks any way he likes

I wanted to buy this little one off of him, but he wouldn’t part with it:

He did let me buy this one, to which my mom instantly took a liking, having no idea who made it or where it came from.  She just walked over to it, picked it up and said “What’s this?”  I told her Al Garnto made it and she held onto it. “It’s intriguing.”  That is always a good sign.

Here’s another little gem in his studio, a mock-up for one of his large outdoor pieces:

There.  I have maxed out on blogging.  I have about one hour before my patience for uploading photos runs out.  I am hoping to get two of Al’s big outdoor kinetic sculptures, including Country Calder, installed outside my gallery in Cashiers.  Al’s advice on dealing with the authorities on this issue: “It’s better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

Mesmerizing turtle head

turtle pitcher (verso)

turtle pitcher (recto)

As Ted wrapped the pitcher for me, he told me it was made by a husband-and-wife team from Cowpens, SC, who happened to be the only African-American potters he knew of who were still working in the Piedmont folk pottery tradition.

Well, the Eugenes are also going WAY beyond any Piedmont folk pottery tradition that I know of.  They are doing things with clay that are just beyond anything, ever.   I visited them in Cowpens last week to pick up work for my gallery.  My photos don’t even do their work justice, but please bear with me and try to use your imagination.

Winton throws pieces on the wheel and does all the surface decoration–detailed paintings with glazes and incised work–while Rosa, a former surgical nurse, comes up with their glaze formulas.  Rosa also makes large-scale pots by hand, using coil-forming technique.  These pots all have an organic shape to them, many suggesting a female form.  This is a coil-formed pot she made to suggest an egg:

a huge egg, coil-formed by Rosa handpainted by Winton

Here are some of Winton’s wheel-thrown vessels:

Winton does the masks too

a close-up of the second one from the left. W/ price tag.

another one of my favorite motifs- the tobacco leaf- and a matte oxidized glaze, which gives it a gorgeous patina

Winton holding a little face cup. He said this was a “drinking buddy” for people who don’t want to drink alone. Ha! He painted the mural on the wall in the background too

And here are more of Rosa’s coil-formed pots, with Winton’s surface decoration:

Winton also does paintings and drawings, and sometimes his drawings are the basis of the surface decoration on the pottery.

a detail of a drawing by Winton Eugene

the pot based on the drawing

And then Rosa sews, so she has created fiber elements for some of the works.  My absolute favorite piece in the whole place was this HUGE coil-formed vessel she made and Winton decorated, with a 4-faced doll head on top she sewed and embroidered.  The doll head had 4 different hairstyles and every face had facial features made of clay, incised and glazed…it didn’t just make my heart race like a perfect piece of pottery does, it made me go totally apoplectic.  Susan Crawley!  Please get the High Museum to buy this piece!

THE masterpiece among masterpieces

And I need to show you all 4 faces:

Did I mention that she added earrings to some of the handmade clay ears they made for the 4 faces she embroidered on the doll head she made for the pot?

Those eyes!

I have a bunch more photos, but they are uploading slowly and I need to go to bed…I think these should give you an idea of the greatness of this couple.

A teeny tiny handwoven Appalachian landscape.  I love these little miniatures!  I will be selling them at my gallery.

Here is one of Tommye’s larger looms with a work in progress:

It’s a “stream of consciousness” piece.  The first row of squares was done entirely without a pattern or cartoon.  The second row was done based on a loose drawing that Tommye rotated as she went along.  “I started doing this after I had an impalement on my hand and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to weave again” using her usual techniques.  Wait, an impalement?  Like she impaled her hand?  Yes.  On what?  The 1″ wide metal bar on the side of this loom:

Yes, THAT metal bar went completely through her hand.  The loom fell apart, collapsed, and the bar went through her hand and pinned her to the floor.  Panicked phone calls to husband and 911 followed.  Luckily, the hand healed and there was no damage to nerves or major tendons.  Jeez!  Now she is thinking of using the rows of squares she has completed as a border, and weaving a landscape from this cartoon.  The piece will be made entirely of scraps, as the first two rows have been.  The basket of scraps is pictured here with the proposed cartoon.

I love Tommye’s drawings/cartoons almost as much as her weavings, and I might be offering those for sale, too.  Her pastels remind me of Bonnard, the way she uses crazy, unexpected colors, but in a naturalistic way.

I invite my readers to join me in a discussion of issues like: what makes someone’s work Southern, and why does this regional distinction matter? How do we draw the line between “fine” art and “folk” art, or between art and design, or art and craft?  Do these categories even matter–to collectors, to scholars, to the artists/artisans making the work?

Pictured in the header of my home page, from left to right: a detail from a stained-glass window by Betti Pettinati-Longinotti, “Homage to Kollwitz;” a detail from a tapestry by Tommye McClure Scanlin, “…and they will be resolved into their own roots;” detail from a blown-glass installation by Kenny Pieper, “Large Satin Gold Goblet Study;” detail from a quilt by Dot Vaughn, “Old Buttons and Birds Crazy Quilt;” and detail from a slip-and-glaze decorated stoneware vessel by Michel Bayne.