Out-there art’s New Hampshire home Wrong Brain, a Dover, New Hampshire, nonprofit, gets a lot right about art. Whether it’s hosting discussions like “Art & Mental Illness” and exhibitions like This Is What TRANS Feels Like, or producing the Wrong Brain Bizaare, an alternative arts and crafts fair, Wrong Brain is an outlet for unconventional and underrepresented artists, writers, and musicians. “It exists to fill a void in the creative community,” says founder Sam Paolini.

Sam Paolini and Adam Gouveia, Get to the Gig, Wrong Brain poster

Paolini founded Wrong Brain as a 15-year-old high school student seeking an alternative outlet to her conventional art education. Meeting at her family’s New Hampshire home, Paolini and other young artists and musicians created zines to showcase their creative talents. After the unexpected death of one of its original members, the group established Wrong Brain as a nonprofit in 2015. “From there, it’s evolved into whatever we felt was lacking in the current community,” explains Paolini.

Sam Paolini and Adam Gouveia, Grand Opening, Wrong Brain poster

Wrong Brain has struck a chord: thousands of area creatives have contributed artistic and musical talents to its efforts, from zines to art exhibits. “There aren’t a lot of opportunities on the New Hampshire Seacoast for people who don’t want to pursue commercial work,” Paolini says. “This really is a labor of love.”

Wrong Brain
Dover, New Hampshire
Website

Top image: detail of a poster created for Wrong Brain’s Spring Bizaare by Sam Paolini

The post Quick Takes: Wrong Brain Is Right-On appeared first on Take Magazine.

This is the story of two people who build mystical worlds from plywood, metaphor, and the electricity of collaboration. Megan and Murray McMillan construct sets in gritty, forgotten places, then stage and record performances that read like dreams. Their videos unspool inside art installations.

In the beginning—the late 1990s—Megan was a writer, and Murray was a sculptor. Now, they’re both more like multimedia producers—or kids building a treehouse to play in on a ridiculously sophisticated scale. “You taught me about narrative,” Murray says to Megan, “and I taught you about space.”

Murray and Megan McMillan, a still from Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder, 2016, video. Photo by the artists

They’re sitting in their new studio, a carriage house behind the home they recently bought in Cranston, Rhode Island. The downstairs is crammed with a lawnmower, camera tracks, and brawny wooden boulders they made for Explode Every Day: An Inquiry into the Phenomena of Wonder, an exhibition at MASS MoCA that ran from May 2016 to March 2017. By this summer, it will be their fabrication space. Upstairs, the open door of the hayloft looks across treetops to Narragansett Bay. In six weeks, they say, the loft will be renovated into a state-of-the-art design studio. Upstairs, dreams will be plotted. Downstairs, they’ll be made real.

“Megan and Murray are constantly engaged with the notion of wonder, of time stopping and being in an in-between space,” says MASS MoCA curator Denise Markonish, who organized Explode Every Day. The couple’s ambitious installation for that show, In What Distant Sky, took four years to design and build. The piece began in a massive coal bin on the museum’s campus. “It was like being in a Richard Serra piece,” marvels Megan.

They’re drawn to settings crusty with history. For What Stands Between Us and the Sun (2010), they built an artificial lake inside an abandoned mill building in Central Falls, Rhode Island. This Land is a Ship at Sea (2015) unfolded in the catacombs of Fort Warren, an old fort and Civil War prison on Georges Island in Boston Harbor.

A place’s specific textures—rust, grime, seared wood—set the stage for their work. So do unlikely materials. The video installation What We Loved and Forgot (2010), in which people ritualistically construct giant daylilies, came about after a contractor’s young widow gave the couple some leftover industrial-grade yellow plastic. “She found out we were artists,” says Megan. “She said, ‘Use it to make something really beautiful.’ We didn’t know how to do that for a long time.” Then they thought of daylilies, whose blooms remain open for just a day, then wither and fall.

In that shoot, the McMillans turned the camera on their own process. The video follows a man as he walks past the flowers being assembled and into a space near where a woman makes sushi—the food that would feed the project’s cast and crew. “We try to make it great: great food, a fun party experience,” describes Megan of filming. “And we have life happening alongside these cinematic moments.” They always invite friends to play. “We like to work with people we know, to stitch their stories together,” says Megan. “We think of it as visual poetry.”

One friend, aerialist Thea Ulrich, performed without a safety harness in In What Distant Sky standing on a boulder that rose several stories. On the way up, she encountered a Japanese couple on a balcony making tea, played by Hirokazu and Hiroko Fukawa. Hirokazu was Murray’s first sculpture teacher. The piece required sprawling vision and exacting execution—a typical McMillan cocktail of creativity and limitation.

Murray and Megan McMillan, in their carriage house studio. Photo by Natasha Moustache

There’s a meant-to-be quality to the McMillans’ love story. The couple met growing up in Dallas and dated as teens. The romance sputtered when Murray went to college, but they reconnected and married young in 1997. Both were creatives: Megan edited poetry journals and played cello until Murray’s art invited her in. He’d tell her about his pieces, and she’d give him feedback. “Really good feedback,” Murray says, looking at his wife. “Then I realized there’s as much of you in this work as there is of me.”

“We realized quickly that to do the work we wanted to do, there wasn’t enough time to keep separate projects,” adds Megan.

At first, they moved frequently. In St. Louis, they found a dusty, unused auditorium in the local veterans’ hospital, and staged Channelbone (2007), a video in which veterans with paralysis in wheelchairs pull helium balloons and dancers tango on a high balance beam. They screened the video, its themes teetering between freedom and limitation, inside a fabricated whale’s skeleton.

The McMillans never intended to land in Rhode Island, but Murray was offered a teaching job at Roger Williams University. Megan teaches, too, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Teaching fits in the same wide net of collaborative energy that kindles their work. In In What Distant Sky, Murray’s former teacher whacks rocks together to light a fire to warm the tea. “It’s also about sparking, banging rocks to create a catalyst energy,” says Megan. “That’s what teaching is. You have the fuel and someone gives you the spark.”

They love Rhode Island because the artist community here provides its own sparks. When they started constructing the boulders for In What Distant Sky, Barnaby Evans, who created WaterFire, a pageant of bonfires on barges in Providence’s rivers, offered them free fabrication space—a sizable donation.

Murray and Megan McMillan, Channelbone, 2007, installation with video, 50 x 16 x 16 ft. Photo by the artists

After collaborating as artists for 15 years, Megan and Murray started a new, familial enterprise. The arrival of sons Arlo, 5, and Jack, 1, prompted their move from Providence to Cranston. In Providence, the McMillans’ studio wasn’t nearby. Now that it’s just outside, they have more flexibility as artists and parents.

Their next project is home based. “We like the idea of embracing the studio as a limitation,” Murray explains. “What can we do right here that returns us to our roots?” Their plan—and who knows how closely they’ll follow it; they like to improvise with glitches that arise—involves a camera filming from a hoisted bucket, a fake landscape, the hayloft, and a sand pile.

Always, they’re in conversation. “It’s a really fun part of our relationship,” says Megan. “We have this rhythm together: ‘What if we do this?’ ‘What if we do that?’”

The new piece has a smaller scale and a faster turnaround than recent projects, but there’s a new twist: Arlo will play a part. Megan has a picture of Murray overseeing construction at MASS MoCA with Arlo snuggled against him in a BabyBjörn baby carrier. Wrapping the kids into the work seems like a natural evolution: it syncs with their spirit of play, and with the family feeling they foster among their collaborators.

Children can be brilliantly creative, but they aren’t always the easiest or most willing coworkers. It’s the next added degree of difficulty for a pair of artists who thrive on a blend of comfort and complexity. “It has a lot to do with letting go of control,” admits Murray, the man who oversaw a project that hoisted high a harness-free aerialist on a wooden boulder. “I feel that’s what I need right now. I’ve had too much control.”

Megan and Murray McMillan
Cranston, Rhode Island
Website

The post Up in the Treehouse appeared first on Take Magazine.

Don Williams finds comfort and joy in the balance between sculptural and functional work. A New Hampshire-based ceramicist, Williams’ focus moves between the two, with each having a distinct purpose in his creative realm.

With its importance in human ritual and routine, tableware is one of the mainstays of his functional work. Creating these items, Williams says, is “extremely grounding.” Starting his work off with an “intimate, simple form,” such as cups, is a great way to “open up an avenue to creativity.”

Between Black and White, 14”X10”X5”, stoneware, salvaged wood, rebar. Perry Smith photo

This simplicity results in beautiful pieces that find their way into the cupboards of many homes. Visitors to his Deerfield, New Hampshire, studio tell Williams about pieces they purchased from him decades ago. These 20+ year old items — cups, plates, and the like — are still in happy use today by their owners.

Williams isn’t the only one that sees the deep value in these handmade goods. Today’s trends toward sustainability and support of local businesses may be influencing consumers, and it’s an idea that Williams completely understands. “Making vessels that people use every day is starting to be valued again,” he says. This goes beyond a connection to the Earth and nature, invoking a spirit of community as well. “Eating off of handmade stuff is meaningful,” he says. “It makes the whole experience of being together, sharing food, a fuller experience.” It’s the significance of these connections that draws Williams so strongly to functional artwork.

Inner Sanctum. Perry Smith photo.

Inspiration for Williams’ sculptural work and wall pieces comes primarily from architecture and landscapes, as he looks to find where the manmade world and the natural world intersect. The outcome of his vision is seen in sculptures and wall pieces that combine clay with other materials, including found objects.

It’s undeniable that the environment of New England has influenced Williams, especially given his relationship with nature. Born in New Jersey, he moved to New Hampshire to attend college and was understandably drawn to the region by its picturesque landscapes and rich history. Initially intending to study veterinary medicine, he quickly found himself falling back into an old love — ceramics. As a child, he had been surrounded by art, often helping his mother — an art teacher and interior designer — by painting tiles or making other small creative contributions. During his college years, this proclivity toward art returned, and he pursued a BFA in ceramic sculpture.

“As I grew up, I kind of realized, this is who I am.” New England, it seems, is a place where people return to their roots.

Williams’ works have been exhibited throughout the Northeast and across the US. Upcoming exhibits include the North Country Studio Conference 25th Anniversary Exhibition in the League of NH Craftsmen Headquarters Gallery in Concord, New Hampshire, as well as Small Kingdoms, an exhibit at the Kelley Stelling Contemporary Gallery in Manchester.

Don Williams – Ceramicist
Deerfield, New Hampshire
Website

Top image: Confrontation. All photos by Perry Smith.

The post When Art is Grounding appeared first on Take Magazine.

Mike Teixeira, board president of Art-Speak (Portsmouth’s cultural commission), saw a point of weakness in the port city once known for tall ships and whales. “We were frustrated that public art seems to take so long to get done for public property like parks and municipal property and the light bulb went on,” says Teixeira. “We could fast track getting art in the city to reflect the real spirit of what’s going on here if we started getting property owners directly engaged.” So they did just that, creating a Craigslist-like website for muralists to connect with business owners in need of art.

The Wilder | Dylan Haigh

This is how it works. First the building owner selects the indoor or outdoor wall that they want to upgrade. Once they’ve decided budget, dimensions, and timeframe, they post their wall on StreetCanvas. Artists can peruse the entries and when they find one that piques their interest, they can submit their ideas for the wall. The building owner selects their favorite submission and gets in touch with the artist directly to start the work.

The Wilder | Dylan Haigh

Since StreetCanvas got its start in June 2017, three murals have been finished. Artist Dylan Haigh, a creative director (among other things) living in Portsmouth, gives StreetCanvas high praise… “I didn’t consider (street art) as something I could really do around here until this year and when StreetCanvas went up,” he says. “Ever since I watched the page like a hawk just waiting for the right wall.” The right wall manifested in the form of The Wilder, a new restaurant within walking distance of Haigh’s home. The idea of having a giant piece of his own art in his neighborhood was too exciting to pass up. “I had the benefit of knowing the folks who own the business. They had been familiar with what I do and they liked the general aesthetic so they told me to go nuts,” he says.

“A city like Portsmouth can get frozen in time,” says Teixeira. The port city is known for its historical elements but that’s no reason to get entrenched in the past. There are troves of artists from newer generations and StreetCanvas was created to give them a voice and protect Portsmouth from falling to the wayside. Why not integrate new art with the more traditional pieces that already live on the walls of Portsmouth?

Live Artfully Chalk Mural | Brian Cartier

While the StreetCanvas initiative has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the community, not every exchange between artist and business owner has been strife-free. “Some business owners and property owners came to the table with very specific ideas and unrealistic expectations and it has been an amazing learning curve of how to figure out how to mediate that kind of stuff,” says Teixeira. The nature of StreetCanvas encourages business owners who may not be particularly art-minded to think figuratively and step into the perspective of the artist to see how the process works on their end.

StreetCanvas is still young, but Teixeira has high expectations for its future. “I hope that this takes off, and it’s a place where business owners and artists can connect and create a bunch of cool financial opportunities for artists to get work on a regular basis for what they do.”

Mike Teixeira, president of Art-Speak
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
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Top image: Portwalk Transformer Fence Mural | Susan Bartlett Rice

The post Painting Portsmouth appeared first on Take Magazine.

At first glance it sounds like a joke. A craft beer aimed at menopausal women? With herbs and spices designed to possibly help symptoms? Cue the laugh track.

But Joanne Francis, co-owner of Portsmouth Brewery, is serious in the way that only a woman of a certain age can be serious, as in she’s been around enough to know what she’s doing — and if you don’t get it, well then, your loss. (See subhead.)

Francis, who has been in the craft beer industry for 26 years, first got the idea for a beer aimed at older women a few years ago. “I have seen a lot of beers developed. The focus is always on 21- to 35-year-old male,” she says, noting she brewed her first batch in her home in 1986. “As we’ve seen the craft beer industry grow and grow and grow, it’s so oversaturated. The same ground is constantly planted. How many IPAs can you possibly make? Here I am at 58. No one is talking to my peers who love beer, who drink a lot of beer, but no one is speaking to my menopausal friends.”

At the office, initial reaction to Francis’ idea was, um, flat. “’You can’t say menopause. It’s so distasteful to young men’,” she says. “I said screw it. I won’t push it. I have to respect that employees need to get behind this too.”

But then she and Portsmouth head brewer Matt Gallagher were talking one day and decided to make a small batch. “He’s very progressive and a new dad,” she says. “He has a new awareness of women in his life, so he said let’s do it.”

Joanne Francis and Matt Gallagher. Photo courtesy of Portsmouth Brewery.

Creating Libeeration took a lot of experimentation. It’s a gruit, which is made from an herb mixture rather than using hops. Francis was inspired in part to make a beer with a strong herbal mix from her own health issues. As someone with Lyme Disease and chronic migraines, she is no stranger to alternative health practices. “I have dabbled into having to know a lot of herbal remedies,” she says, noting she worked with natural health practitioners while experimenting to find the right herbal mix for Libeeration. (The beer includes motherwort, lemon balm, chamomile, stinging nettle, mugwort, rose, chickweed, and damiana.)

“I thought wouldn’t it be great to make a beer using some of these floral remedies,” she says. “Wouldn’t [women] appreciate being honored and being treated as if menopause is not a curse but a liberating part of your life. Let’s have a drink together and celebrate it.”

Alternative health fans (and women who’ve tried everything short of knocking themselves out with a hammer to get a good night’s sleep or dousing themselves in a cold shower to stop a hot flash) will recognize many of these herbs. Several can help calm and/or reduce moodiness. Damiana, meanwhile, can potentially help add moisture to your body. Francis and Gallagher started by making teas with the various herbs. “The herbs had to pass the tea test to be sure they had a nice flavor,” she says.

Francis has a simple response to skeptics who might question the potential health benefit of a beer. “This isn’t medicine,” she says. “I’m not trying to be a doctor. Even if it doesn’t help, it helps to know someone cared. That’s my primary purpose. What would be a nice tribute to women at a certain age. I’m making a flavorful beer with some nice properties that I think you would really like.”

It’s a prescription a lot of women appear to be ready to adopt. Portsmouth Brewery sold out of its first batch and is about to release its second batch. “It’s been ridiculous. I never expected the amount of attention,” Francis says. “We’ve been getting hundreds of emails from every state and across the world.”

So far, Libeeration is only available at Portsmouth Brewery, but Francis hopes to change that. “The next step is to graduate this beer so we brew it in a bigger facility.”

Take that, skeptics.

Joanne Francis–co-owner, Portsmouth Brewery
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
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Top image: The Libeeration ladies. All photos courtesy of Portsmouth Brewery.

The post A Libeerating Experience appeared first on Take Magazine.

In a carpenter’s workshop at Portsmouth’s Strawbery Banke Museum, the Leftist Marching Band is smoothing out the rough edges of its Halloween night set list. More than a dozen band members are here on a cold Monday night, crowded around table saws and piles of wood, working out the kinks in the songs they’ll perform at the Portsmouth Halloween Parade the following week — “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” “Evil Ways,” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

After a song wraps up, someone asks band leader Elizabeth Wolff about the tempo on “Saints.” “We’ll have to play that part by ear,” she says. And without pause, someone quips, “We play it all by ear!”

The raucous, rag-tag street band is now in its 13th year, and it’s perhaps the busiest one yet. Though the Leftist Marching Band (LMB) has long been a staple at public events throughout the New Hampshire Seacoast, Wolff says 2017 has seen an “above average number of gigs” for the band, especially following the inauguration of a certain social media-obsessed president in January. One of the crowning moments? The Portsmouth edition of the national Women’s March on Jan. 21st, where the LMB played for some 3,500 demonstrators in the middle of Market Square.

“You can feel the collective response of the people around you,” says Wolff, who plays the trombone. “Having 3,500 people show up in Market Square would’ve been awesome anyway, but having the LMB in the middle of it and feeling that collective energy focus and move to a collective rhythm was so powerful.”

Not bad for a band that started in 2004 as a temporary project. Wolff is one of the band’s early members. With the second half of the George W. Bush administration in the offing and the war in Iraq dividing the country, the idea behind the LMB was to inject some energy and fun into the progressive causes. Made up mostly of former high school marching band members, it was a loose, “musically unpracticed” group, Wolff says.

But they tapped into a broader movement. “We didn’t know street bands were a thing,” Wolff says. “The Iraq War really spurred a bunch of street bands, and we were part of that without knowing it.” And while you’ll find the LMB most often in Portsmouth and surrounding locales, you can also see them each year at Somerville’s Honk! Festival, standing alongside other street bands.

Pat Spalding, the band’s majorette, and Wolff are the band’s most visible faces — Wolff at the font of the band, marching, shouting, and waving her trombone in sweeping arcs, usually while barefoot, and Spalding, dancing, twirling, and spinning a baton, usually while wearing a colorful dress.

As the LMB marches into the future, Wolff hopes the band takes more direct action in drawing attention to important local and national causes. The band had a rare victory this year when a New Hampshire court restored access to Sanders Poynt in Rye. The public access point to the beach, Sanders Poynt was closed to the public in 2012 by the nearby Wentworth by the Sea country club. While locals fought the closure in courts, the LMB kept the issue in the spotlight, playing gigs on the beach and raising awareness about the fight.

“What our impact on the outcome was, I doubt it’s a measureable thing. But we had something concrete that we did and the role of the band was really clear, and I’d like to see us do more things like that,” Wolff says.

That spirit of hope is what keeps the band going. “It’s happiness,” Spalding explains. “The music gives you hope, that idea of making joyful noise. That we’re in this together and we’re going to make change.”

Leftist Marching Band – Street Band
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
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All photos by Larry Clow. The video is by Suzanne Laurent.

The post #TakeAction and Make a Joyful Noise appeared first on Take Magazine.

“There’s this little lesson you give at the beginning of the show,” says burlesque performer Ruby Solitaire. “Basically, you say it’s okay to hoot and holler during the show. We want you to make a lot of noise. Just don’t be gross, don’t be cruel, and everybody’s going to have a good time. It’s about boundaries.”

Solitaire explains that defining expectations between burlesque performers and their audience or establishing “burletiquette” as coined by Bastard Keith, is an essential step in fostering the kind of atmosphere Solitaire wants at an Excelsior Burlesque show. She definitely aims for sultry, entertaining, and raucous, but she also wants her performances to be a space of expression, power, and body and sex positivity for the Excelsior performers of varying gender and racial identities.

Still confused about the difference between club stripping and burlesque? Solitaire has your differentiation: “[Burlesque is a] very artistic form of striptease that’s meant to tell a story and go beyond the capabilities of narrative that a traditional club stripper may have. [Club stripping’s] purpose is individualized attention, whereas burlesque is a three-minute play for the audience.”

Elsa Riot in Excelsior Burlesque. Photo courtesy of Ruby Solitaire.

Solitaire’s troupe used to perform in New York City, but after a change in cast and a few years hiatus, she’s back in New England ready, in a lot of ways, to start fresh. “Coming to New Hampshire, I realized I couldn’t assume that people had the lexicon for understanding burlesque, before they got into nerdlesque,” she says. (Nerdlesque is a subgenre of burlesque performance that uses nerdy references and pop culture properties as inspiration for themed shows or one-off acts.) Excelsior has its big homecoming show on December 9th at Jewel Music Venue.

Solitaire will bring in some performers she knows and trusts to do more classic performances before she starts doing the more brainy, subversive or “tightly themed” acts. No matter if she’s dressing up like one of Neil Gaiman’s characters from the extremely popular Sandman graphic novel series, doing a classic peel-off to reveal tasseled pasties, or if she’s stringing together acts as a tribute to the FX show show Archer, her performances are always “[a] nexus of strip tease, comedy, theater, dance and music. Raunchy, but with a wink and a nod.”

Harley Foxx. Photo by Pete Olsen

Ruby Solitaire’s pensive approach to burlesque performance goes beyond an entertaining rule-making, precise curation, and deep pop culture references. Hers is a political approach, specifically offering shows that are intentionally inclusive and body positive. “You have to be active in your casting if you want to be a body positive show and a diverse show,” she says. “You can’t just put out a casting notice saying ‘inclusivity encouraged’ or ‘we encourage people of color to apply for the show’ or ‘we encourage trans people to apply for the show,’” says Solitaire. “We actually have to go and seek these people out. But before that happens, you need to be sure you have a safe place to do it, in terms of the physical location and in making sure that people aren’t going to yell out horrible things. It’s definitely a challenge as a white, cis producer to do that, but it’s something that’s very worth doing.”

Ruby Solitaire – performer and producer at Excelsior Burlesque
Manchester, New Hampshire
Website
Twitter

Top image: Ruby Solitaire. Photo by William Skrainski.

The post Proper Burletiquette with Ruby Solitaire appeared first on Take Magazine.

It’s hard to escape the debate over the proposed border wall with Mexico, but, if you live in New England, difficult to envision the area where it would go. New media artist John Craig Freeman has brought the U.S.-Mexico border to Boston through a technique called augmented reality (AR), or digital information integrated into the world in real time. His project, Virtual U.S. Mexico Border, enables viewers to be in two different worlds simultaneously.

A friend and I downloaded the layar app onto our iPhones and looked for the virtual wall at the Boston Common under a blue October sky. As we approached the band shell, past the hot-dog cart and tennis courts with the Prudential Center partially visible, the words 12 points of interest found appeared on our screens. We wondered if people thought we were playing Pokeman Go, which uses the same technology.

“I’m in Mexico,” my friend called out. I was a few steps behind her but soon saw it emerge: a wall decorated with a colorful mural. We walked closer, it came into focus, and then we walked through it to the U.S. side, where a barbed wire fence came up from the beach. We had the disconcerting sensation of stone-faced border guards watching us. We saw the backs of people peering through the fence to the area where friends and family from both sides can meet briefly.

Screenshot from Virtual U.S./Mexico Border: Migration Stories, geo-located augmented reality public art made on location in Boston Common 2017 by John Craig Freeman.

“One of the things I try to do is humanize stories that have a political theme,“ says the professor of new media art at Emerson College in Boston. “Our politics now rely on the notion of the other. Making a border is a psychological thing.”

Commissioned by the 2017 Screen City Biennial in Stavanger Norway,  the border project was his way of documenting the North American migration crisis. Shortly after he was done in Norway, he set it up in Boston.

Along with his other AR projects, it is “geo-located,” meaning he has enabled it for specific locations. He takes hundreds of photos on location, then builds the scene by using software to extract a three-dimensional model. He can replicate it anywhere, and he has no set date for taking this one down.

At the Salem Maritime National Historic Site, Freeman has another project, Virtual China and Virtual Russia, where, by being in two places at once, a viewer can experience their connectivity. In Virtual China, a mother and daughter sitting in a courtyard of a former palace can be seen during a virtual walk through the city of Wuhan in Central China. In Virtual Russia, an image of Saint Petersburg emerges piece by piece as viewers walk along designated points. Both are part of The Augmented Landscape, presented by Boston Cyberarts on view through November 30th.

“China and the Baltics were two parts of the world that were critical to Salem becoming an important port,” Freeman says. “We think of globalization and international trade as occurring now, but it has been occurring for hundreds of years.”

Seeing the pieces is not hard. Simply enable location on your smartphone or tablet. Download and launch layar app. Pull down upper left menu, tap Geo Layers, then Search Layers and search for Salem Art or US/Mexico Border.

Top image: Screenshot from Virtual U.S./Mexico Border: Migration Stories, geo-located augmented reality public art made on location in Boston Common 2017 by John Craig Freeman.

Studying painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography at the University of California, San Diego, followed by a master’s at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Freeman soon realized that he was not cut out for conventional art that he would need to market. Instead, he wanted to make public art “to address the social and political issues of our time.”

Then the internet became a public square. “We saw the migration of the public square to everywhere but nowhere,” he says. “I followed it down the rabbit hole to mobile networks and turned to the quest to create new forms of art.”

A native of San Diego, Calif., Freeman lives in Windham, N.H. His work isn’t so much influenced by where he lives as by “how digital networked technology is transforming our sense of place,” he says.

John Craig Freeman–new media artist
Windham, New Hampshire
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Top image: Screenshot from Virtual U.S./Mexico Border: Migration Stories, geo-located augmented reality public art made on location in Boston Common 2017 by John Craig Freeman.

The post Exploring an Augmented Reality appeared first on Take Magazine.

Quilts are tangible records of American life, a tactile method of storytelling. Anna Von Mertens’ bold conceptual quilts tell more than stories: they’re hand-dyed, hand-stitched reflections on existential questions about time and space. “Time plays a key role in my work,” she says. “I’m drawn to existential or time-based scientific data. Looking, observing, quantifying and naming—it’s not dissimilar to the artistic process of looking and seeing.”

Originally a printmaker, Von Mertens, who lives and works in Peterborough, New Hampshire, received a bachelor’s degree from Brown University. She stitched her first quilt in college and was transformed. “I just fell in love with the medium,” she says. “There are all these associations with quilts and if you take an idea, then translate it through quilting, you see things in a different way.” Von Mertens explored her passion in the textile department at the California College of the Arts, receiving a master’s degree in fine art.

Marriage and family eventually brought her back to Peterborough and the east coast. She explored the dichotomy between her east coast roots and west coast sensibilities in an early quilt series called North, South, East, West, depicting each region as energy patterns; the east coast was portrayed as a black hole. “I saw the east coast as an introverted landscape and the west coast as extroverted,“ she says, “but it wasn’t meant to be a definitive statement.”

Jupiter Rising, January 7, 1610, Padua, Italy, 2008, hand-stitched, hand-dyed cotton, 54 x 100 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery; photo by Don Tuttle.

Her studio, in a former textile mill in Harrisville, New Hampshire, helps create a sense of place. “It’s a wonderful place to work and the history feels very present,“ she says. “I’m in a section where the textile looms were.”

Von Mertens uses scientific phenomena to interpret events, thorougly researching and immersing herself in a subject before, and while, creating her work. She designs her patterns on a computer, then uses a projector to transfer the patterns to hand-dyed fabric, outlining them in chalk; then she stitches the outlines. Her favorite body of work mapped stars above violent historic events in U.S. history, such as September 11, 2001 and the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. “It links these questions of time and our place and perspective to it,” she says. “I sited the viewer at the act of violence in a way you’re removed from it but in the moment.”

Bacchus’ aura, after Caravaggio, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 39 3/4 x 33 in. Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Don Tuttle photo

Her next project is inspired by her daughter’s fascination with phone emojis. “I’m looking at emojis and how they’ve become a language we’re making together,” she says. “My daughter thinks they’re amazing. It’s like a visual art language.”

Von Mertens’ work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the RISD Museum; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery, among others. Upcoming shows include Shape/View, the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Portland, Oregon, September 6-30, 2017; and Another Time, Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, November 1-December 17, 2017.

Anna Von Mertens–Artist
Peterborough, New Hampshire
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Top image: The Duke and Duchess of Urbino’s auras, after Piero della Francesca, 2009, hand-dyed, hand-stitched cotton, 18 x 13 in. (each). Photo courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery; photo credit Don Tuttle.

The post A Stitch in Time appeared first on Take Magazine.

Earth Eagle Brewings is leading a beer revolution focusing not on hops but gruits, and chronicling the journey in a new book.

Ask Earth Eagle Brewings co-founder George “Butch” Heilshorn about his business strategy for attracting a more traditional beer drinker into his Portsmouth gastropub, and his answer may surprise you. “The hardcore Bud Light drinker will likely be disappointed,” he says, sitting in the small bar a cafe-like seating area of his craft beer pub. “The people who come here, they are on a mission.”

That mission, as it turns out, primarily involves gruits—beer that has little to no hops and relies on forged herbs, spices and roots to give it flavor. In fact, so serious is Hailshorn and co-founder Alex McDonald about this style of brewing that the brewery contracts with a forager who collects the spices and herbs from New England forests, swamps, and the seacoast for the house brews. “If you look at the history of beer, it’s only in the last couple centuries that hops became a thing,” says Heilshorn, a former high school guidance councilor. “Hops have nothing to do with alcohol anyway.”

Instead, between March and October, Earth Eagle gets a weekly list of available herbs and spices, and the co-founders along with their brewers go through them to select that week’s brews. Their beer menu changes weekly and sometimes daily, with about a half dozen of their own brews and a half dozen New England-based brews available at any time. Recent featured gruits have included Queen Mojo, featuring mugwort and wild carrot flower, and John’s Cross, featuring St. John’s wort, ginger root, lemon grass, rue and bee pollen.

Earth Eagle Brewings co-founders Alex McDonald and George Heilshorn

Earth Eagle got its start in a backyard when McDonald married Heilshorn’s sister, and the two began home brewing on a backyard picnic table. “We started getting positive feedback, and people started talking about our brews,” Heilshorn says. “And through it all, we just brew to satisfy our own curiosity about all these different styles.” Some of those unique styles are on full display in the form of recipes and history in Heilshorn’s new book, Against All Hops: Techniques and Philosophy for Creating Extraordinary Botanical Beer (Page Street Publishing).

Between the book and the pub (and McDonald and his wife own A & G Homebrew Supply, a beer making supply store tucked into the other side of the building), Heilshorn is convinced the craft market can only grow. “Look, Portsmouth is just on fire. It’s a boom town,” he says. “And 80 percent of the beer market is still that yellow fizzy stuff. As long as those numbers are there, those customers are fair game!”

George “Butch” Heilshorn–co-founder, Earth Eagle Brewings
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
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All photos by Dan Szczesny

The post Doing Gruit Work appeared first on Take Magazine.