Johnny Swing in his Brookline, Vermont studio. Photo by Paul Specht

Master welder Johnny Swing lived and worked in New York City for 13 years before bringing his curvaceous coin-based furniture to rural southern Vermont. “New York is a hard place for artists,” Swing says. “My mother was a painter. I was always discouraged by her innumerable excuses for not making art. So at a young age I pledged that I was never going to not make art. I had junkies for roommates. I lived in a burned out studio. None of that mattered. I can make art under any circumstances.”

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Johnny Swing is a master welder, dairy farmer, sculptor, and somewhat devious poker player. He’ll tell you what’s in his hand just because that’s not the way things are done, then dare you to bet against him. Swing’s work sits beside de Kooning’s, rests on the lawns of the Duke of Cornwall and the Storm King Art Center, and is displayed in Christian Dior stores in Beverly Hills, Tokyo, and Seoul. He’s also a leader in the American Studio Furniture movement, his work considered on par with contemporary masterpieces by Ron Arad and Marc Newson—a position that makes Swing chuckle, feigning complete ignorance. For a former ’80s Manhattan art-kid troublemaker who used to hang with Basquiat, the development of Swing’s art from explosive installation to folk-art avant-garde has been linear, but the thinking that goes into his craft has been as curvaceous as the lines that run through his current work.  

Swing first started making furniture from coins in 1997, with Penny Chair. Using a design based on Harry Bertoia’s Diamond Chair (with legs inspired by Tatlin’s Tower, a tightly wound, constructivist monument designed in 1920), Swing’s initial piece was met with resistance. Consisting of 6,500 pennies with over 30,000 individual welds, the piece was basically a riff on Harry Bertoia’s iconic design. The indifference toward the piece sent Swing back to an actual drawing board, where he conceived his first completely original coin furniture piece, Nickel Couch (2000). With its graceful organic shape and unconventional use of materials, Nickel Couch got traction immediately.

“I’ve always been a sculptor,” says Swing. “My goal wasn’t to make furniture; after Penny Chair I felt defeated. I needed to create my own shape. I thought I was doing something smart—not in a sarcastic way—but taking something from the past, collaborating with the past and adding a sense of brilliance to it. No one got it. But the day Nickel Couch came off the mold, it got picked up by a local paper and went national within a week.”

Swing on his Brookline, Vermont, hobby farm, photo by Paul Specht

A Connecticut native, Swing, 56, moved to southern Vermont in 1995 from New York, a city he didn’t find conducive to marriage and a newborn. The family rented, then bought, a 200-year-old house that had once belonged to Swing’s grandmother, a well-known suffragette, in the tiny farming community of Brookline. The setting—a hobby farm with cows, sheep, and chickens—is a stark contrast to the sleek, urban vibe of the furniture he creates in the glass-and-cement studio Swing built a mile away. “I worked in New York City for 13 years,” he says, “and people thought my work was so urban. Now I’m in the country, and all of a sudden I’m a ‘Vermont artist.’”

While his work has been shown in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Miami, it’s taken 22 years for Swing to have a show in the state where he lives: a solo exhibition at the Bundy Modern in Waitsfield, which ran July 21 through September 17, 2017. A proverbial labor of love, the exhibition featured seldom-seen lamps, built like ominous alien lily pads, that had been in storage for years. “They’re some of my favorite works,” he says. “The lamps are like doodling for me— basically free-form organic structures with a lot of structure inside them. It took an enormous amount of effort to put them up, but it’s valuable to remind myself how much pleasure I got in making them.”

The most recognizable feature of Swing’s furniture, besides the overtly sensual curvatures that run through nearly all his work, is the use of U.S. coinage as the primary physical component. Creating furniture out of pocket change can have a disconcerting effect on the viewer. While the lines of the work are reminiscent of Isamu Noguchi, or maybe an original earthworks drawing by Robert Smithson, up close, the aged dollar coins of his more recent work pull the viewers out of the realm of aesthetic curiosity, and push them into a sociocultural analysis of the work.

Half Dollar Chair (2013) in the Manhattan home of a private collector, photo by Jamie Diamond

“I use old coins because I love the history of them,” explains Swing. “Say a piece has 8,000 coins in it—what’s the least amount of people that have owned those coins? Say 10 per coin: that’s 80,000 experiences locked up in that work. How cool is that? This history of a single piece is just mind-blowing.”

Eventually, the viewer starts to wonder just how much the work cost to build. Swing faces this question every time the work is shown. “Money is way more dynamic than functional,” he says. “A shovel is functional, but are people precious about their shovel? What we’re really talking about are the materials the furniture is built with. [If you’re] using round metal shapes to make furniture—if it’s not coins, the next most logical thing would be a washer. But ironically, you can’t get a washer the size of a 50-cent piece for 50 cents! It all starts with a Yankee mentality of thriftiness—and it’s really funny to think of using coins as being thrifty.”

Nickel Couch, 2000, photo by Jamie Diamond

The other question in this, Swing describes, is whether the furniture is worth more than the coins it took to build it. The question comes not only from people trying to be funny, but also from a place of deep uncertainty, especially when confronted with a couch made of more than 8,000 dollar coins. Compared to the work of Richard Prince or Andy Warhol, whose mastery comes in the form of reinterpreting images, Swing’s work incorporates the literal money itself, setting up a whole other slew of questions and considerations.

“That question approaches a viewer’s insecurity and morality,” he explains, “because [the furniture is] clearly worth more than the money it’s made out of. The fact that people are interpreting the art on that level means they are confronting the value of money, and [the idea] that money has an implied intrinsic value. There’s something beyond my control, in a really positive way, about using money as a medium to work in. Does it put me in a little bit of a box? Yes. Am I the coin furniture guy? Yes. Do I resent it? Sometimes. But at the same time, I feel really privileged that I’ve come up with a way to pose these questions, especially about the intrinsic value of art.”

Penny Chair, 1997, photo by Jamie Diamond

David Eskenazi, an early Swing collector, notes Swing’s instinctive sense of design and raw organic sensibility. “There’s an intuitive level of craftsmanship that goes into the furniture,” he says. “A lot of people are creating biomorphic forms, relying on computer models to develop the shapes, pushing the forms to their extreme. But with Johnny, the shapes all spring directly from his hands, and sometimes a chainsaw. His furniture isn’t symmetrical; it doesn’t fit classical molds of what furniture is supposed to be. It’s not geometric or perfectly symmetrical, but that’s part of what makes [the pieces] so surprisingly comfortable.”

Swing’s gut-level approach is compelling. Going back to Penny Chair, and most notably in Ring Chair and Ring Couch (2012), Swing has developed an ornate arachnid style to his furniture’s legs and backing, none of which is drawn up ahead of time. The backings are completely free form—visualized, then built on the spot without blueprints or instructions. The work appears kinetic, or as Swing calls it, “like the feeling of a cat when it’s about to pounce.” And while the couch might be made of coins or ring shapes, the angular backing is seamless and ornate, like subtleties in an extended jazz composition, adding depth and signature to the work instead of being a mere pedestal on which it stands.

For a master of the American Studio Furniture movement, organic lamps, chairs made of glass jars, and coin-centric couches might very well be the heart of Swing’s work, but his fixation with currency and response to it as craft material sometimes moves from eccentrically sensual to truly disconcerting. In addition to building stuffed animals from paper currency, Swing stitched together a rug in the shape of an American flag (Dollar Bill Rug, 2017), which was exhibited on the floor of his New York gallery, R & Company. Even though Swing testified in front of Congress in 1994 under the Visual Artists Rights Act regarding the eventual destruction of one of his installation pieces, he considers Dollar Bill Rug less a political act and more a performance-art piece. So is this new direction a shape of things to come? “I don’t foresee the work getting more and more pointed. I think it’s going to keep its rounded edges,” Swing says, gesturing to a half-built dollar couch. Then again, he’s a hell of a poker player, so with Swing you never really know.

For more images from our shoot at Johnny Swing’s studio, visit our subscriber-only gallery. 

Johnny Swing–furniture maker
Brookline, Vermont
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Top image: Murmuration, 2012, welded nickels and stainless steel; 32.5 × 132 × 55 in. Photo by Jamie Diamond

The post To Coin a Chaise appeared first on Take Magazine.

Vermont Performance Lab (VPL) isn’t your standard artists’ retreat. Located in the hills of Guilford, Vermont, VPL’s mission is to provide dance ensembles with a decidedly modern rural retreat where the entire company comes together to craft new work in an intensive, dedicated space. Sara Coffey, who founded VPL in 2006 and is a former dance company manager, recognized the challenge under-financed ensembles face when trying to find working space for troupes that are in the process of developing new projects. VPL wasn’t built to host performances, but rather as an ‘incubator’ where new pieces are cultivated and brought to life.

Candice Salyers | Photo by Jeff Woodward

“An incubator is a context or set of conditions that you need to be able to make something,” Coffey says. “Our artists are working in a multidisciplinary arena, so there’s practical conditions that need to be met: a space to work in, somebody to get the space for them, production support, research support, and an organization that helps facilitate that. The artists we’re particularly interested in supporting are the underdogs. They’re the ones who don’t have a permanent company, permanent space, or permanent home. Otherwise they really wouldn’t need us.”

Part of VPL’s mission is to help integrate dance companies with folk from the local Southern Vermont community, fostering collaborations that might not otherwise exist. VPL shows have included collaborations with local farmers, community colleges, Youth Services, the elderly, and even a performance featuring trained dogs herding sheep. The work is also socially minded, with themes such as masculinity, immigration, African-American culture, homelessness, and living in an object-based society all taking featured roles in the collaborations.

Beth Gill at 2015 Open Lab | Photo by Kelly Fletcher

In addition, VPL is home to the SEED program, which was launched in 2015 to “help Vermont’s dance ecology.” Focusing on choreographers, the SEED program offers residencies to Vermont artists who, in turn, develop their work both in Guilford and Montreal, Canada, through a partner organization called Studio 303. “A SEED artist will get two residencies, a stipend, and travel support,” explains Coffey. “They have access to my experience: I know how the field works and can offer suggestions on grants, how to get their work touring, and who in the industry can help them bring that about. That’s necessary information built into the VPL program.”

Dahlia Nayar and Margaret Paek performing 2125 Stanely Street at the Danich Gallery | Photo by Kelly Fletcher

Coffey admits that not all of the collaborations are successful. “If you’re going to encourage risk taking, it’s important to have some failures.” She remains undeterred, however, crediting the Vermont community for continued encouragement and inspiration. “We’re not living in a big city where nightly performances can be a social activity. Folks want to be outside in their yards, digging in their gardens, writing their own work. We’ve been here long enough now that people give us a chance—they want to see what VPL is up to. They might not always like what we offer, but they keep coming back and that feels like success.”

Sara Coffey | Photo by Kelly Fletcher

Sarah Coffey – founder, Vermont Performance Lab
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Top photo Krissy Tate of Time Lapse Dance at VPL’s Party Under the Stars | Photo by Kelly Fletcher

The post Retreat to Move Forward appeared first on Take Magazine.

Soo Sunny Park’s studio in Lebanon, New Hampshire, is a literal hive of activity. Along with her assistants, she is bending and snapping together the last pieces of BioLath, an installation piece which opens at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, on February 25th. The diamond-cut metal lath is being twisted into a series of organic, cloud-like shapes whose sensual curvature isn’t just an exercise in aesthetics. The edges of the mesh are sharp, the modular sections are intentionally transparent, and the finished work, unlike classic sculpture whose form is meant to viewed at a respectable distance, is built to be walked through, seen through, the completed installation physically fragmented by both the viewer’s perspective and the light that moves through it.

Soo Sunny Park, concept model for BioLath, installation at the Currier Museum, 2017 | photo courtesy the artist

Displacement, perception, and self-awareness are central themes that move through Park’s installation art. Park emigrated to the United States at age 11, and had already begun to grapple with the central questions that would later take physical form in her adult work. “I went through an existential crisis when I was six,” she says. “I began to wonder about existence and why I can’t see my own face, my own eyes, and why I always feel like I’m looking out from the inside. How others see me, the body, is not how I’m aware of it. Then you start to ask about consciousness. Is there life after this? You question if there’s a soul. I try to think about that kind of duality when making art, and what happens in the middle.”

Soo Sunny Park, concept drawing for BioLath (detail). Installation at the Currier Museum, 2017 | Photo courtesy the artist

Park, a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, began her career as a painter. Struggling to understand the role of painting, she grew increasingly interested in sculpture, a form whose physical possibilities drew her attention. Debating the inherent differences between the two, Park took on a new project. “I poured paint on the floor and cut it to form a body,” she explains. “It was a clothing piece, but was it also a painting—or did I just create a sculpture? Now you’re inside the artwork. Now you see the world from inside of a painting, inside the sculpture. I tried to flip the kind of space that the viewer would experience so that they’re wearing the piece and looking out from a reverse perspective.”

Soo Sunny Park, Silver Linings, 2015 | Photo courtesy the artist

Park came to Hanover in 2005, having taken a professorship at Dartmouth College with the idea of making New England her home. As an installation artist used to a much more aggressive urban landscape, she was once again faced with issues of displacement. “I moved around a lot as a kid and was a bit afraid of being in a rural area. A lot of artists feel they have to be in New York, obligated to show up at certain events and see certain people. There’s not that kind of pressure here. It’s a different speed of life, and I feel focused. So being in a quieter place, especially as an installation artist, has been great.”

Soo Sunny Park | Photo by David Nielsen

Soo Sunny Park, sculptor
Lebanon, New Hampshire
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Top photo Unwoven Light, 2013 | Photo courtesy the artist

The post Stretching the Form appeared first on Take Magazine.

“My heroes have always been artists who reinvent themselves every few years,” says Brattleboro, Vermont artist Mutsu Crispin. “I love it when an artist goes through a transformation repeatedly. Picasso. Miles Davis. Someone who isn’t afraid to step out of their norm and become something new.“

Mutsu Crispin is also the pseudonym of John DiGeorge, a bouncing, 46-year-old dervish of an artist who is at times a costume designer, puppeteer, oneiric film instructor, filmmaker, choreographer, and, currently, a classic visual artist. Mostly though, Crispin is an explorer interested in transformation.

Mutsu Crispin | Photographed by David Nielsen

Crispin grew up in Marietta, Georgia, and then attended Harvard, where, he says, “they’d just hand you a camera and tell you to go make something.” After Harvard, Crispin moved to New York City, where he learned how to make movies, then to Brattleboro to begin work on Redbelly, a film written with his cousin Justin Allen. Redbelly is a freakishly old-world fairy tale, featuring a princess trapped in a stone tower, bereft of human contact. It also features a prince with an external glass stomach, born unable to use his mouth to speak, cry, or eat, who was captured by an opportunistic moonshiner who uses the glass stomach as a still.

“I’d been doing a lot of dream work,” Crispin explains. “I’d been delving deeply and consistently into my dream world. There were a lot of themes and images and interior dramas playing out in my dreams that a fairy tale would be an easy vehicle for. Redbelly (still in production) is very particular to Vermont, but not set in Vermont. It all grew out of the landscape. The stone tower. . .there’s stone walls everywhere. There’s also a monster in the movie. What’s the monster in the woods of Vermont? It’s a bear that carries winter in its belly. The prince gets stuck in his belly, and it’s the harshest winter imaginable. We filmed that sequence in a snowstorm in the White Mountains. The mythology is definitely grown out where we were when we conceived it.”

Redbelly Tower | Photographed by Mutsu Crispin

Crispin’s alternative project, Bouncy Ball Art, seems crafted by an entirely different artist. The series, which can be seen at the A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts March 8-April 2, is whimsical, bright, and playful. The constructions feature bouncy rubber balls pressed between plates of heavy plexiglass, then screwed together to hold them in place. The clue that links both pieces is an almost mythic reexamination of the fantastical aspects of childhood, never mind that the finished pieces look like massively constructed Hasbro Lite-Brite screen panels.

“There’s a lot of places these pieces go,” Crispin says. “The grids are pixelated. I grew up playing Atari, playing Nintendo. I was totally into video games—all those early video games like Super Mario Bros. All of these pieces are like the background of Zelda or Super Mario Bros. They’re also used to express the deepest impulses of things I’m exploring in my life.”

So where did the name Mutsu Crispin come from? DiGeorge used to spend summers working on a farm; he saw the words repeatedly on old apple crates, and they caught his imagination. “I’ve always felt a connection with Japanese words and filmmakers,” he explains. “I liked the juxtaposition of the Japanese word Mutsu with the English word Crispin. I came up with these two characters: Mutsu is an alien and Crispin is a monkey. They came together to form Mutsu Crispin, which is an apple, but also the name of my production company.

Sanctuary | Photographed by Mutsu Crispin

“I’ve always been caught by cultures where as an adult you name yourself,” he continues. “You go on a vision quest, and when you come back you name yourself. Sometimes at an art opening, someone will come up to me and ask, ‘Are you Mutsu Crispin?’ I really like that.”

Mutsu Crispin – multimedia artist
Brattleboro, Vermont
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Top photo Bugs, photographed by Mutsu Crispin.

Bouncy Ball Art can be seen at the A.P.E. gallery in Northampton Massachusetts, March 8-April 2, 2017.

The post How Do You Like Them Apples? appeared first on Take Magazine.

Every kid dreams of being a race car driver. But not every kid dreams of fabricating their roll-cages. For Isaac Juodvalkis, co-founder of Whetstone Workshop in East Providence, Rhode Island, a combination of creativity and circumstance led him to his current career in metal fabrication.

Silver #brazing #lesson with #brass footrests for the Architect's Stool from @studiodunn #furnituredesign #architect

A video posted by Whetstone Workshop (@whetstone_workshop) on May 27, 2016 at 9:19am PDT

“I was looking for a summer job,” explains Juodvalkis, who, at the time, was 17 and living in Davis, California. “I got hired at an Audi shop, and quickly found out that I’m not a very good mechanic. So I started teaching myself how to use the metal shop equipment, and slowly became their fabricator.”

While working there, one of the shop’s owners got into a BMX bike accident and was paralyzed. “He was very much into race cars,” Juodvalkis says, “and wanted a race car built for himself. He had a car that was front-end crashed, and nobody else in the shop wanted to work on it; but I didn’t have anything better to do, so I spent all of my time working with him to figure out how to build a race car.”

Brass pedestal bases rolled from sheet metal.

After a few years at Audi, Juodvalkis became an architectural metal fabricator at Metropolis Metal Works in Alameda, California, before making the leap to the Rhode Island School of Design in 2006. It was there that he met his wife Maria Martinez; in 2010, the couple founded Whetstone Workshop, a metal fabrication shop whose work is all handcrafted in-house. Whetstone’s reputation quickly developed with clients as diverse as Google and the United Arab Emirates, collaborating on projects as straightforward as lamps and chairs to building sculptures and structures for interactive exhibitions.

Whetstone Workshop is located in an old mill in East Providence, a trend that shapes the revitalization of the entire New England countryside. Developing their workshop in East Providence was also essential to the physical development of Whetstone. “Building out in New England was a critical factor because there’s a heavy industrial aspect to the area,” he says. “I had the ability to inexpensively purchase machine tools and all of the equipment required because there’s been a history of making things here for over 200 years. In California, they don’t have the same kind of 1940s equipment tucked away in garages and abandoned warehouses.

Solid brass hexagon side table for Refine Limited

“Rhode Island is also also a pretty good middle ground for us,” he continues. “Providence is a hip community, and we’re close to Boston and New York, which is where most of our work right now ends up. Culturally and geographically, it’s a very, very good mid-point.”

Juodvalkis and Martinez’s vision for Whetstone Workshop was to build a fabrication studio that melds exquisite craftsmanship with the ability to translate a client’s design ideas into fully realized projects. “It’s a constantly evolving and developing process, but the core work is to support a group of interesting and passionate people in a decent lifestyle. It isn’t just about money, but producing work you care about. I’ve turned down work I didn’t feel passionate about. The main goal is to provide a place that we can make anything we want however we want, and I think we’ve done that.”

Isaac Juodvalkis -co-founder of Whetstone Workshop
East Providence, Rhode Island
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Top photo: machined brass counterweights | All photos courtesy Maria Martinez

The post Masters of Metal appeared first on Take Magazine.

Step into the Brattleboro Printmakers studio and it’ll take a moment for your eyes to focus. There’s racks of screened clothing, tables covered in ephemera, a t-shirt press in the center of the floor, and shelf upon shelf of screens and prints hiding a cavernous exposure unit and photo lab in the far back of the studio. It’s chaotic, but organically chaotic as happens when a print shop is both well used and constantly evolving. Even Brink Gallery initially conceived as a way for the studio to show the work of outside artists, has simply morphed into a dense collection of prints in every stage of production.

At the center of Brattleboro Printmakers stands the heavily bearded James Primrose, owner, co-founder, and director of the studio. Primrose set out to build a print shop unique to the area, and one that also fulfilled his own interest in music. Brattleboro Printmakers is a non-toxic, water-based, membership-driven silkscreen print shop that hosts a twice-monthly music series, making it doubly unique in the region. It’s also a repository of a seemingly endless, shifting set of ideas as to what a print shop can be and how it functions.

“There’s nothing like it anywhere nearby that’s not in a collegiate facility,” Primrose says. “People in Southern Vermont appreciate it because it’s more DIY, and friendly to anyone who wants to play around. Musically, there’s a lack of venues in the area that fit the bill of ‘underground music’ coming through. We also have people traveling from Western Mass to do the art stuff, but mostly we have people coming from all over to see the music.”

A natural showman and organizer, Primrose is also the founder of The Wonky Press, a startup monthly image design contest with the winning entries voted for directly on Primrose’s Facebook page. The Wonky Press winners can have their work printed traditionally on paper in a limited edition, or on t-shirts or hats. Though the competition is an open call, it’s also a potential tool for members to get their art into the public views. “Printmakers’ members are getting to the point where they’re just starting to make large numbers of things,” explains Primrose. “Wonky Press is a way to constantly have a new product that doubles as an advertisement for the artist and shop. The artist takes a commission out of every piece without fronting any money.”

Gravitron by James Primrose

Fully into its third year, the studio is also working to develop its own screen-printed quarterly called A Pile: A Brattleboro Zine, a mixture of text and illustration, as well as expanding the capabilities of what the shop offers new members. Unlike traditional print shops, Brattleboro Printmakers don’t offer classes. “I just teach everything for free,” says Primrose. “When you join the studio, your first 3-4 sessions are on the house, everything is accessible. I’ve never had regular business hours; I’ve always been at the whim of other people’s schedules. It’s not always easy, but we’re still here and that’s something.”

James Primrose is a printmaker and co-founder of Brattleboro Printmakers in Brattleboro, Vermont. Follow the Brattleboro Printmakers blog and keep track of their upcoming events featuring work from their members.

The post What Comes Next Is Already Happening appeared first on Take Magazine.

The joke in Vermont is that it takes two jobs to survive. Joshua Farr, director of the Vermont Center for Photography, has at least seven. Beside his work at VCP, Joshua is a web designer for Good Bear Productions, handles event photography for the Brattleboro Art Museum, repurposes old furniture, organizes Pop-Up Brattleboro, teaches photography at In-Sight Photography Project, and is also is a professional photographer whose documentary-style work is a sweet mixture of the awkwardly bucolic and the deeply held. But it’s at VCP where Josh’s largest regional impact is felt.

Cameras for sale at Vermont Center for Photography | Photo by David Nielsen

Farr is a New England native, born in Maine but now a full-time resident of Brattleboro. After getting his BFA at the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2011, Farr responded to a Craigslist ad for a Gallery Manager position at a non-profit in Brattleboro. “I thought it was pretty far-fetched,” he says. “I was a photographer, but never held an administrative position, especially for a non-profit. I applied, drove out in my rag-tag farm clothes during Hurricane Irene, and a week later I was offered the job. Turns out the deciding factor was that I’d been an Eagle Scout as a kid. I’d hesitated to put it on my resume, but it was one of the best things that ever happened to me.”

As Director and architect of the entire 2017 calendar at VCP, Farr makes a point of focusing on New England photographers. “Brattleboro is an extreme example of an arts-rich community that really puts a focus on supporting local artists,” says Farr. “That said, I feel like artists in Brattleboro are starving for a venue. I like being able to support our local photographers while simultaneously exposing them to people they’d otherwise be unfamiliar to.”

Photo from the Curbside series, 2015 | Photo by Joshua Farr

Founded in 1998, VCP is a member-driven organization that has semiannual member shows as well as practical workshops, a public darkroom, printing services, and artist discussions. Farr thinks the member shows are the strongest representation of what VCP has to offer. “There’s certainly no lack of local talent,” he says. “Our immediate radius is an hour to an hour and a half outside of Brattleboro. Our members also submit to an Open Call for exhibitions. We usually get 50 or so proposals for solo shows that we whittle down to five or six annually. At least half of these are New England photographers, and some of them end up being members, but membership isn’t factored into the solo show selections.”

Farr’s own photographs are intensive studies, thematically culled from the commonplace items of Farr’s own life. Works like Curbed Collections, a series that documents household objects left by the side of the road, collects images of items we ourselves once collected, forming a disjointed narrative that speaks to how we value the things we own. The series Things That are Orange features quirky images of things that are orange in our everyday life, and Downstairs, perhaps the most intimate of all Farr’s work, documents the collected objects and vignettes of his father’s basement, servings as a disembodied “time capsule” of his life.

Photo from the Downstairs series, 2015 | Photo by Joshua Farr

“It interests me when you start to notice what you notice. When you decide to start looking for orange things, for example, you’ll see them everywhere.” Farr shrugs then adds, “Maybe my goal as a photographer is to convey the personal meaning behind my photographs to people who don’t know anything about me, but still somehow be true to myself as an artist.”

Joshua Farr at Vermont Center for Photography offices | Photo by David Nielsen

Joshua Farr is the Director of the Vermont Center for Photography in Brattleboro, Vermont. Follow Farr on Instagram, and follow Vermont Center of Photography on Facebook.

Top photo from the Things That are Orange series, 2016 | Photo by Joshua Farr

The post Curating the Visual appeared first on Take Magazine.

Tim Olson’s job in life is to take the inordinately complex and make it as functionality seamless as possible. A multiple award-winning architect interested in the utility and stability of structure, Olson’s background in sculpture also informs the exteriors of his finished work. Developing his professional skillset as a fulcrum between the two disciplines can be a rather fine line, but it’s the middle way between the two where Olson and his work thrives.

Porches Model by Tim Olson | Photo courtesy Olson’s website

Olson received a Master of Architecture from MIT in 2011. After attending a lecture by Tedd Benson at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Olson was so impressed that he decided to move with his wife and two young children to New Hampshire to join Benson’s Walpole-based architecture firm, Bensonwood. Olson says he chose Bensonwood because “it seemed radical in that they were just doing the work, doing the academic work, designing real projects then realizing it.” Just as importantly, Bensonwood is a hands-on facility where the architects are also sometimes responsible for creating aspects of the finished work by hand, skills that are more classically associated with tradesmen. The combination fits Olson perfectly.

“There’s a craft tradition in New England that Bensonwood builds off of that I have affinity for,” he says. “If you talk to Tedd, he’ll tell a story about finding old timber-frame houses in Walpole and deconstructing them to see how they tick. This place is an anomaly in that it’s rooted in a rural area. It’s all the contradictions that I find appealing in a place. It’s super high-tech, but the vast quantity of the output is low-tech. It’s timber-frame; this place is rooted in New England.”

Olson first began work as a visual artist, but found it unsatisfying. “It was an interesting practice,” he acknowledges, “but it wasn’t collaborative enough, or tied enough to specific problems. Architecture ends up relying on relationships with many people. No building is built by one person or designed by one person. It involves a team; I enjoy the collaborative environment. Installation art can get close to this, but making space is the territory of architecture.”

Inside the Wing Back design | Photo courtesy Tim Olson

In 2015, Olson was one of four winners of the Toronto Winter Stations Design Competition, part of an initiative to turn snow-covered lifeguard stands in the city’s beach area into art installations. His entry, Wing Back, is modeled after a cozy wingback chair, and features a chiminea-style fire pit at its center. The year before that, he won the 2014 Timber New England Competition with Coopered Column, which was developed to demonstrate how large-scale structural columns could be designed to withstand the loading conditions of tall timber buildings.

“In order to structure taller buildings,” he explains, “you need to be able to connect materials and assemble it out of smaller pieces. Wood isn’t the ideal material to connect end to end. As you start stacking the wood together, you end up with weak points everywhere. What Coopered Column does is finger-joint these two things together.” The idea for Olson’s design comes from cooperages, where wine and whiskey barrels are made. “Using the cooper, the screws help keep the form from buckling and holds the vertical load, but also knits these two things together the length of the materials so you’re able to make a taller thing. It demonstrates the ability to withstand these forces by taking what would have been a cylindrical column, turning it into a cone, then cutting it. It forced an asymmetrical load as if there was wind being blown on it.”

Olson chose Port Orford Cedar for his curvaceous design, mostly for its aroma. “It smells natural, resinous. The wood itself is probably not what you’d use to structure a tall building, but to put that wood in a gallery was part of the point. Have you ever been to the Earth Room in New York? You get out of the elevator and you smell it, you smell the Earth. The fact that you’re making a building out a structural material that smells good, that’s natural, was also part of the exhibit.”

Olson’s next challenge, one that’s closer to his leanings as an artist, is the development of a small furniture company he calls Typodesine. His first prototype is a deceptively simply chair. It’s a smooth, modern, surprisingly comfortable piece, cut expressly from plywood. “I think furniture design puts you in touch with a manufacturing idea,” he says, “ideas about materials, about texture, about ergonomics. I think those things feed into architecture in a different way—a much more tactile, more intimate sense. My hope is to end up with something unique.”

As for how he merges his work as an architect and as his ideas for developing Typodesine, Olson is quick to reply. “It’s a matter of exposure and growing beyond a kind of street installation. What am I working on this week? I’m working on furniture. There’s always a special part of a building that is somewhat of an installation. There’s always a lobby, a courtyard, a place where the public gathers that’s special. I’d like to see some of these ideas end up in real buildings.”

Photo of Tim Olson by David Nielsen

Tim Olson is an architect and designer living and working in Walpole, New Hampshire. Follow the Bensonwood team on Instagram.

Top photo Tim Olson’s award-winning Wing Back design | Photo courtesy Tim Olson

The post The Middle Way appeared first on Take Magazine.

Scene: Busy coffeeshop just after dusk. Location: Northampton, MA. In walks a bedraggled, white-bearded, black coffee-swilling, grump-meister named Tom Pappalardo. His laptop is scratched, stickered, and held together with a clamp. He looks like Liam Neeson about to do someone some very serious damage. “I used to be a semi-professional curmudgeon,” he says, “but now it’s more of a persona. I think I’m actually much nicer than I used to be.”

Pappalardo, an Easthampton, MA-based graphic designer, musician, and longtime comic book artist (Everything You Didn’t Ask For, 2014), has written, designed, and, through his new press, Object Publishing, self-published One More Cup of Coffee (2016), an observational compendium of his visits to coffee shops throughout Western Massachusetts. The book really doesn’t have anything to do with coffee, except insofar it’s the liquid folks gather around to talk life, death, and pretty much everything else in between. Tom visits these spots, gets himself a cup of their darkest coffee, sets his back to the wall and just listens. The locales range from classic New England coffee shops like Shelburne Falls Coffee Roasters, to supermarkets (Trader Joe’s), to the most ubiquitous of middle-America coffee sellers like Dunkin’ Donuts and a Starbucks inside Barnes and Noble.

“It came about as a way for me to get out of the house,” Pappalardo explains. “I made a list of places, some of which I’d been a regular at for years, then others – hey how come I don’t go there?” He developed a following writing weekly Facebook updates of his observations, which became about 90% of the book, “though,” he promises, “the book is much better edited.” The book’s subtitle, “In Which the Author Barely Talks About the Coffee” was by design. “A lot of the Facebook fans thought they were café reviews. I’ve lived in the area for 20 years, I knew a lot of the owners. I wanted it to be clear that this wasn’t an extended Yelp review.”

Instead, Pappalardo reviewed the customers inside the shops, telling their stories through his story, which is most often full of rage at the base foolishness of our entire culture. With lines like “I’m trying to be less of an asshole,” it’s clear that Pappalardo enjoys being a character in his own book. It also allows him to offer up some wickedly brutal assessments of the most mundane or overwrought conversations.

Behind Pappalardo’s umbrage is the sense that we’ve lost touch with being, and feeling, part of a larger community. “Even folks our age or older are blindered and not mindful of what’s going on around them,” he says.” A big part of this book was a mindfulness exercise. I’m going to a place just to observe. I try to make it as funny as I can, because that’s the genre I work in.”

Tom Pappalardo | Photo by David Nielsen

Though it seems the antithesis of his old-school coffee shop haunting, Pappalardo also made One More Cup of Coffee available on Kindle, a move that strips it of its design, physicality, and character. It’s a sign of the times, one he acknowledges with a wince. “I’m more interested in the object  of the book,” Pappalardo explains. “I just wanted to make a nice book. It’s the same with albums vs MP3s. I’m certainly from that era where I remember growing up and buying a cassette at the mall. You’d sit and listen to it and read along with all the lyrics. You build a connection to the album. I’m also a graphic designer; you can’t have an album without a cover. So yeah, to me this is the closest I get to art, whereas the Kindle version is the raw data. If someone wants to consume that, that’s fine—I’m not going to stop them. But the book is way cooler.”

Follow Tom Pappalardo on-line, on Instagram, and multiple Facebook pages:
personal | graphic design | writing & things, etc.

Illustration by Tom Pappalardo

The post Sit. Sip. Scrutinize. Scribble. appeared first on Take Magazine.