Portland-based potter, civic activist, and native Mainer Ayumi Horie is carving her own space, as a creator, as a lesbian, and as a person of color, in a mostly white, historic colonial New England neighborhood. She’s a full-time studio potter, and her work is inspired by folk traditions from American and Japanese cultures, and adamantly defined by its utility—you’ll see more ramen bowls and mugs than decorative objects, and she expects them to be used—and the process by which it’s made. As a board member of the American Craft Council and the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and curator of the popular crowdsourced project Pots in Action and civic engagement effort The Democratic Cup, Ayumi uses her position as a leader in the maker community to encourage civil, productive conversations about social issues, and to amplify the voices of makers across the country through these conversations.

Ayumi and her wife, Chloe Horie, don’t consider themselves collectors. While their home abounds with ephemera—from a 1960s mechanical Japanese massage chair to a stuffed grouse on the wall to the studio’s packing tape—the inclusion of these objects in the house reflects intent. It’s clear that nothing in the house is intended to be stared at from behind a museum rope, and while the house teems, there’s not the slightest hint of clutter.

Ayumi refers to herself as a maker more than a potter. While the maker moniker has become a symbol for those partaking in any sort of productive tinkering, Ayumi’s entire life is deeply ensconced in maker ideology. As she puts it, she’s interested in the “intersection of all making, whether you’re cooking or growing something in the garden. We’re all creative in myriad ways. It’s not about being a hermetic artist and showing off your genius; I really don’t believe in that idea at all.” Making, to Ayumi, means putting the requisite time and effort into all of one’s endeavors and engaging with the world in a consistently thoughtful way.

As Ayumi leads a tour of her idiosyncratic abode, accompanied by Chloe and Clover, their French bulldog, it becomes increasingly evident that she is serious about living up to her maker philosophy. Some of the inanimate inhabitants of each room—objects that may not, on the surface, seem to represent Ayumi’s practice as a potter or a civic activist—speak to her ideology as a breath-by-breath maker.

Ayumi Horie at work, at home. Photo by Aaron Flacke

1. A Revolutionary War Painting

Featured prominently in Ayumi and Chloe’s living room is a painting of the Burning of Falmouth (a Portland-famous Revolutionary War attack in 1775), featuring their house and the houses of their neighbors being struck by incendiaries hoisted by Royal Navy ships. In the version by painter Michael X. Rose that hangs above the Hories’ pellet stove, the houses burn while King Kong wrestles Moby Dick in the cove among the battleships, and Godzilla watches from the background.

“When I moved to this neighborhood, it was, and still is, predominantly white,” Ayumi says. “While my mother’s family came to Maine in pre-Revolutionary times, my Asian looks mark me as an outsider. Presenting a revised narrative of the neighborhood and city by using mythological monsters seemed like an effective way to make a point and create a place for myself.”

Ayumi further remarks that her house, now light and spacious after some bold renovations, was quite dreary when she purchased it. It’s doubtful the dreariness had to do with the fallout from the Burning of Falmouth or from any purported sea monster event, though houses in New England tend to wear their history on their sleeve far more than the residents themselves.

Though originally from Maine, Ayumi spent time in Seattle and Montana, as well as ten years in the Hudson Valley, before returning to New England. She’s compelled by the aesthetic of snow, the community, and the changing seasons. “Living in a historical environment reminds us that we are only stewards of a place and that we’re just one small part of a continuum,” she muses.

2. A Ping-Pong Table and a Potter’s Wheel

Yes, these are two separate objects with very different functions, though one would be remiss not to notice how easily the leisurely becomes functional, and reciprocally, how the professional tool becomes the center of social activity.

During the tour of the house, Janine Grant, Ayumi’s assistant, has been working on Ayumi’s signature decorated ceramic ramen bowls, which are in various phases of completion in the attached studio space. Some bowls are freshly pressed and need to have their rims hand-trimmed at Ayumi’s wheel, and some need to be glazed. The bowls sit atop the ping-pong table at the entryway to the studio, which sounds precarious if your idea of a ping-pong table is a painted waferboard rectangle that’s buckled in the middle from too much time spent folded in a garage. The Horie table is not this—it’s handcrafted from three-quarter-inch AC-grade plywood, and solid. It has likely borne the weight of well more than the dozen bowls currently waiting for attention.

At some point during the tour, Clover, the French bulldog who seems particularly adept at placing herself in the center of any action, is stepped on. Chloe says that Clover is an intrepid ping-pong ball chaser, and is prone to blisters and other foot problems from overindulgence in the activity. Repetitive stress injuries appear to be a recurring consideration in the Horie household—Ayumi works as many as 14 hours a day, between studio and computer time, though she is starting to dial back her work schedule somewhat. And Chloe seems just as natural sitting at Ayumi’s pottery wheel for a quick chat with Ayumi and Janine as she does anywhere else in the house; there are no closed doors isolating workspaces, and no space is too sacred for visits from bipedal or quadruped family members.

3. A Raccoon Pot, or Maybe It’s a Hedgehog

Ayumi raises one question several times during our talk: How do you talk about the nature of craft? Inherent in the question is a consideration of repetition and uniformity. Ayumi has created multiples before: bricks, cups, and decals of images. Even though her hand-painted designs have been drawn repeatedly, there are differences in how they’re drawn, and in these variations Ayumi finds evidence of her own skill. “I’m not interested in the idea of a masterpiece,” she states. “I’m interested in the idea of the beauty of craft lying in the skill of the maker. Through drawing it over and over, it changes.”

Examples of this approach are everywhere in Ayumi’s studio and storage space: ramen bowls that were folded in half when pressed, introducing variation to the process and showing how one vessel can literally be folded into another so that a bowl becomes a plate. A stack of leftover bricks from the Portland Brick project she completed with Elise Pepple, with memories of the city stamped to give them a “pillowy” human-created effect instead of the sterile water-jet-cut font one might expect with a piece of urban infrastructure. Or Ayumi’s custom-designed animal decals, which she applies to her pots individually so that they appear slightly different on each piece.

Her famous raccoon decal appears in various incarnations and at various levels of detail on assorted pieces. When it’s misidentified as a hedgehog, Ayumi points out, “It has fangs. And an overbite.” Her point is inarguable. It’s a raccoon.

A Laptop at the Kitchen Table

In addition to the demands of full-time studio work, an increasing amount of Ayumi’s work time is dedicated to managing her various social networking, activism, and crowdsourcing projects. Her slow-movement ethos bleeds into this online work, too. The crowdsourced Pots in Action project, with over 106,000 Instagram followers, is arguably the world’s largest online community for ceramics makers, and Ayumi relies heavily on Chloe’s opinions when presenting the online work. “Coming up with paragraphs-long captions takes time, and maybe not many people read them,” she admits. “But I want to give people depth, when often what’s most popular is superficial and predictable. I want people to be more thoughtful about the media they put out there, and the way they engage with the world.”

Ayumi has also recently forayed into filmmaking, applying her same methodical attention to detail to the craft of videography. “Chloe’s a far better video editor than I am, and taught me everything I know,” she says of her most recent experiments. Whether the training was formal, the influence is evident in the outcome: Ayumi’s videos contain a professional polish against an online video universe largely comprising hundred-edits-per-second stroke inducers. “I hope to redefine for people what video and photography can be,” she explains.

4.  A Japanese Massage Chair

The chair in the Hories’ living room appears to be a cross between a 50-year-old wheelchair and the bespoke musical instrument of a street busker. Instead, it’s a perfectly functional mechanical massage chair that Ayumi’s uncle brought to the States in the 1960s. It’s never needed restoration or modification, which, as she puts it, “is just the way machines were built back then. I spend a lot of time here at the end of the day. It’s the antidote to manual labor. I sit in it many nights while Chloe and I watch some BBC show or other. It’s a workhorse that I remember my grandmother using, and it gets rid of my aches and pains.”

A grouse hangs above Ayumi Horie, her wife Chloe, and their French bulldog, Clover. Photo by Aaron Flacke

5.  A Stuffed Grouse

The stuffed bird in the entryway could be a pheasant or grouse, so a text for clarification to the resident game bird expert is in order. A photo is sent with a discreet message: “Is this a grouse?” He writes back immediately: “It’s two women and their dog.” Then: “And a grouse.”

6.  A Custom Sideboard

Few, if any, of the dishware pieces in the Horie kitchen sideboard are part of a conventional set, and while most are, unsurprisingly, handmade, very few are Ayumi’s own work. “I hope that all the things I do are generative in some way and create a spirit of sharing, and aren’t just about navel-gazing,” she explains, and mentions that she has no need to feed her own ego with her craft.

The sideboard was custom designed to fit her salad and dinner plates—the result of a barter with Hudson Valley woodworker Andrew Hunter. The pots were mostly made by friends and other makers. Some are Japanese antiques, and the few that are hers are largely included because Chloe wants them around. Ayumi considers them markers of how her aesthetics have changed over time and where she’s been in the world. “What ties it all together is the owner’s aesthetic,” she notes. “In some ways, the future of handmade ceramics depends on the idea that [those] pots aren’t part of a conventional set.”

7. Last Year’s Wood Stack

Ayumi’s interest in examining temporality and impermanence in her craft extends to her day-to-day life, as one might imagine. Ten years ago, she founded the International Society of Woodstack Enthusiasts, a Facebook group designed to explore the nature of crafting something as temporary and ever-changing as one’s winter wood stack, and to allow enthusiasts to compare how different cultures approach the task.

“The point of stacking wood is that it dries out and burns better, and you can do it in a lot of ways. The aesthetic perk is that snow looks really good on a perfectly stacked beehive stack,” Ayumi describes. “And stacking wood is yet another thing that you could do thoughtlessly, or take a little more time and derive real pleasure from it.” At the Horie house, last year’s wood stack was in the shape of a small house, with walls, windows, and a gambrel roof.

Last year’s wood stack may no longer be a physical object in the house, but this conversation with Ayumi has proven that’s clearly just a technicality—and not simply this year’s ashes.

Ayumi Horie
Portland, Maine
Website

Photos by AARON FLACKE

The post Clay Date appeared first on Take Magazine.

Ask many of today’s classically trained musicians to improvise, and you’re likely to be met with fear and anxiety. Not so for Providence, Rhode Island, cellist Laura Cetilia. She revels in living in the musical in-between.

Cetilia still loves her Mahler and Britten—she plays in the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra and the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra—but her real passion is improvised and conceptual music. “Conceptual music is not about melody or even rhythm,” she explains. “It’s about sound over time. That’s a huge shift compared to contemporary classical music, where it’s still meters and keys you have to play.”

Take this composition she wrote for a string quartet. In it, the musicians need to slide up their respective instruments in half-note increments, essentially creating one 20-minute-long glissando. The notes need to remain in the correct chordal structure—i.e. move together so that the sound is tonal—and the instrumentalists must also sing the note as they play. “It’s kind of impossible,” Cetilia admits. “But the imperfections are what make it beautiful. Things start rubbing up against each other. You get all these overtones that you won’t hear if it’s done perfectly. The result with human error makes this beautiful moment.” 

Playing this kind of music, says the 42-year-old, is both liberating and scary. “I’m attracted to that fear,” she says. “What I like about it is that it’s all about the moment. Everyone—the audience and the performers—are experiencing the same thing, in a way. I think when you’re busy sawing away on these notes [in traditional music], you’re so concentrated on what you’re doing that it separates you from the listener, whereas if you have to sit in silence for a minute before you play one note, and then sit in more silence, you’re experiencing the same thing as an audience member. It gets to the heart of what performing should be—you’re sharing this moment and this space with the listener. It’s what I love about it.”

Cetilia performs in a variety of groups dedicated to experimental music. She and her husband, Mark Cetilia, perform together as Mem1—she on an 1892 German cello, often gigged up with a computer and other electronic devices, and he using video/audio hardware and software. They improvise to create a sonic duet. Cetilia also plays in Suna No Onna, a viola and cello duo committed to performing new music, and Ordinary Affects, a collaborative effort of performers and composers devoted to experimental music.

Appropriately, Cetilia’s romance with the cello starts with a robot. Like many children, Cetilia was forced by her mother to take piano lessons, which she resisted. But in fifth grade, she saw the movie Electric Dreams. “There was a cellist in it and the computer falls in love with her after hearing her practice,” Cetilia recalls. “The owner of the computer falls in love with her, too. I fell in love with the cello through that movie.”

The dream might have died with the film’s closing credits, but Cetilia, who grew up in East Los Angeles, went to a public school with a music program. “The orchestra’s conductor was really keyed into what was going on around town,” she says, noting that he referred her to a program on the California State University campus called the Saturday Conservatory of Music. “It was for kids who are really into playing music. You get group lessons and then orchestra on Saturday mornings from nine to twelve. I would stay until three because this amazing cello teacher would give me lessons. It was for low-income students, mostly Latino families, so it was very affordable for my family. That sealed the deal for me to have that.”

The Saturday program gave Cetilia a haven in a world where, as the child of a Mexican-American mother and a white father, she always felt a little in between. “I was the only one of my friends who was mixed. I never felt like I fit in, so I became accustomed to that,” she remembers of her weekday public school life. “It’s another reason why I didn’t go the traditional route after graduating from school. I didn’t want to do what everyone else was doing musically. It’s something that’s ingrained in me.”

Laura Cetilia at home. Photo by Natasha Moustache

Cetilia’s childhood musical opportunities are a big reason why she works at Community MusicWorks, a neighborhood music school in Providence that’s its own mix of the nontraditional. “I am a product of a public school’s music program. That’s why I work where I work,” she says. “It was my savior.”

Cetilia’s interest in experimental music started at that Saturday program, too. “My teacher encouraged us to experiment,” she says. “We would just go crazy. She gave me the freedom that allowed me to experiment. To me it was a natural thing to do. I realized later you have to put in more focused practice to get even better at your instrument, but my heart was really into exploring other things.”

The sense that music goes far beyond black dots on a page is something she’s trying to introduce to the kids she works with now. “I want to get them acclimated to a different way of playing music and thinking about sound and space and the sounds around you,” she says. “It’s a much looser interpretation of what music really is.”

Cetilia put her own interest in experimentation on the back burner while attending Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. “They’re into contemporary music, but it’s more that you’re a performer and you have to master your instrument in order to play whatever music is in front of you,” she describes of her time there. “I was more interested in exploring my instrument as an extension of who I was, not just re-creating someone else’s vision.”

Of course, wanting to play conceptual music and getting experimental music gigs can be two different realities. In an effort to remain true to their mission, she and Mark started their own record label, Estuary Ltd., devoted solely to producing experimental music. “We try to release music that wouldn’t be released otherwise,” she says.

After artist residencies in Norway and the Netherlands, they landed in Providence because Mark came to Brown University to get his PhD, and the city has proven to be exactly the right spot for musical experimentation. “Providence is sort of the best place for us to be in making the music we care about,” she says. “It has a long-standing history of nonconformist musicians/artists living in and throwing shows in abandoned warehouses and such, so pretty much anything goes. That scene is changing a bit these days due to gentrification and the fact that Providence is also a transitory city for lots of kids on their way to New York, but there is always a handful of dedicated people that continue to present challenging shows, despite whatever obstacles.”

Laura Cetilia–cellist
Providence, Rhode Island
Website

The post Positive Space appeared first on Take Magazine.

On the island of North Hero, Vermont, one turn off the main road, is an unassuming house with a sizeable garden. There is a bush bearing slender purple beans. There are fuzzy stalks of borage, with blue flowers that taste of cucumber. Plump tomatillos dangle from lush plants, their delicate husks turning from green to brown, becoming desiccated and lacy. Nearby is a flower patch, with blossoms in sunny yellow, salmon, pumpkin, and crimson.

“We planted all of this nasturtium last year,” says Aaron Josinsky, who stands between the raised beds in his garden wearing a boater hat and a short-sleeved button-up shirt, gesticulating in the direction of the flowers. “The leaves are delicious; the flowers are beautiful. You can ‘caperize’ the buds. We make nasturtium pesto and throw flowers all over it.”

Aaron Josinsky grows vegetables in his North Fork, Vermont garden for Misery Loves Co. Photo by Dominic Perri

At Misery Loves Co. in Winooski, hungry diners can find handmade pasta tossed with that garden-fresh nasturtium pesto, served over a smear of Vermont ricotta and garnished with bright flower petals that Josinsky harvested that morning. The unassuming cook—he doesn’t like the word chef—co-owns the restaurant with his spouse, Laura Wade, and her brother, Nathaniel Wade. The trio made a name for themselves at Burlington’s Bluebird Tavern, where they specialized in bringing a bit of weird to a small-state restaurant scene that was otherwise somewhat bland, and a few years behind trend. There, they piled tender orange sea urchin atop scrambled eggs, quietly made their own charcuterie, and sent marrow bones leaking fat to customers who had never before scraped part of their meal from a cow’s shank.

In 2012, when the threesome moved Misery Loves Co. from a food truck into a brick-and-mortar location, they offered a mix of casual fare and eccentric dishes. The former included the Rough Francis, a fried chicken sandwich with hot sauce, blue cheese, and pickled celery. It was standard American in concept, and perfect down to the smallest detail in the execution. They also served percebes—alien-looking barnacles harvested on the Iberian coast—and coal-black spaghetti topped with Rhode Island squid, fried cauliflower, rings of hot pepper, and a sprinkling of bonito flakes that danced in the steam rising from the pasta and its sauce.

The following year, after a drive-by shooting in their neighborhood catalyzed them into action, the business partners moved from Winooski to the peaceful Lake Champlain islands, where fertile soil lends itself to apple orchards and farms. Outside of the Josinsky-Wade house (Nathaniel lives next door), they planted a few crops in raised beds. None of them expected the change of venue to affect Misery’s fare. But over time, as their garden beds multiplied, a flock of chickens materialized, and farmer-neighbors became close friends—and then perhaps a bit more like family—it did. Josinsky admits, “I don’t want to say it’s changed our cooking, but it has. The food is simpler. It’s like home cooking, but it’s more refined.”

The shift in focus is broader than what shows up on the plate. Asked about himself, Josinsky shows more interest in talking about his neighbor, Ben Pomykala—who moved home to Vermont to help his parents run the family farm. “They have a strawberry social and invite the whole island,” he says with a grin. Walking through the garden, he points out some sorrel that Eda—Josinsky and Laura Wade’s four-year-old daughter—loves to snack on. “She thinks it’s the best thing,” he proclaims, with a hint of pride.

Being a good husband and father, Josinsky suggests, is now his primary focus. So is being centered. While some chefs throw plates in the midst of a stressful conversation, Josinsky has been known to suggest taking a few deep breaths and imagining a sailboat bobbing up and down on blue water. Being healthy, he notes, matters more than creating the weirdest, hippest dish on the block.

Take the harvest crudités, for instance, which consists of a colorful pile of raw vegetables—slices of radish, red cabbage, romanesco cauliflower, cucumber, torn shiso leaves, sprigs of dill, purple beans, and those omnipresent nasturtium petals—topped with salsa verde and a little browned butter. The result is gorgeous, yet so unassuming, it’s daring.

Nathaniel Wade shows off the hen of the wood mushrooms he foraged for Misery Loves Co. Photo by Dominic Perri

Vegetarians used to complain that Misery wasn’t for them. Perhaps they saw things like “veal heart” on the menu and ran. But, on one autumn day, a full eight of the menu’s 20 snacks, small plates, and entrées are free of meat or seafood. Why the shift? In part because growing vegetables—shepherding them from seed to sprout to fruit—has deepened Josinsky’s relationship with them. “I can read [vegetables] better these days. I can see them in multiple different realities at different times,” Josinsky explains. “It’s more intuitive. It’s more fluid.” When they do purchase animals, which they often buy whole or in larger primal cuts, they strive—as they always have—to use all of the bits, including the kidneys, heart, and testicles, the last of which might be served with a sauce made of eggs, as a bit of an anatomical joke.

These days, some of their meat comes from just down the road, where Amanda and Hugo Gervais operate Savage Gardens, a diversified 90-acre farm. There, two bull calves graze in a paddock, chewing placidly as Hugo goes about his chores. Tomorrow, one of the steers will go to slaughter, and half of the carcass will end up at Misery, where it will be turned into osso buco, tartare—laced with fish sauce and topped with a fluff of parmesan—and smoky kielbasa sausage.

As Josinsky talks about sourcing, Nathaniel Wade strides up with his dog and two bulging canvas bags. He opens them to show his brother-in-law the bounty therein, large clusters of hen-of-the-woods mushrooms. The culinary wheels start turning.

Unlike the chefs at many restaurants, even those who label themselves farm-to-table, the owners of Misery allow the daily catch—whether it’s seafood, recently slaughtered animals, or freshly picked veggies—to drive that evening’s menu. Now, Josinsky is dreaming up a dish that will use up the sausage from his last Savage Gardens veal calf; the pearl-gray mushrooms that Nathaniel foraged; some leeks from another nearby business, Pomykala Farm; and herbs from the plots in which he stands.

Misery Loves Co.’s braised veal shank. Photo by Dominic Perri

The Misery crew refers to their garden as In the Weeds Farm, a play on the term chefs use when they’re cooking as fast as they can and the orders are still piling up. Sitting at the restaurant’s counter, staring straight into the open kitchen, one never sees the cooks looking like they’re “in the weeds.” Wearing white coats and navy-blue aprons, each member of the team appears calm, focused, and pleased to be there.

At the restaurant, an hour before service, Nathaniel Wade steps over to the sound system and cranks up some Metallica. The cooks’ heads bob in time to the beat as they pick dill and parsley from their stems and pop the leaves into quart containers. Then, 30 minutes early, a customer walks in. Laura Wade hands her a menu, chats for a moment, then sidles over to change the music. A moment later, David Bowie’s bouncy “Modern Love” has replaced the heavy metal.

As the restaurant opens, plates begin to roll off the line. Josinsky is in the back, trusting his team to execute the dishes to spec. When an order comes in for the veal kielbasa, a cook pulls out a bunch of pint and quart containers and begins to build the dish. A cylinder of sausage goes on the flat top; he piles mushrooms and leeks in a small pan with a dollop of sauce made with butter, veal stock, dijon, tarragon, and Banyuls, adding some jellied meat stock before setting it over the flame. Halfway through cooking, he tosses the meat under the broiler. Pinches of herbs go into the pan.

When everything is done, the cook pours in a lick of sherry vinegar and spoons the mushrooms and leeks onto a blue-and-white plate in a rough circle. Seven thick slices of the veal sausage go on top, with pickled mustard seeds, broccoli flowers, and chives as garnish. The finishing touch? Red and yellow nasturtium petals from In the Weeds, of course.

“We don’t call ourselves a farm-to-table restaurant, but we are,” Josinsky explains. “But, we know that the economics of that sort of thing don’t work.” He continues, “maybe, to be a farm-to-table restaurant, you need to have a farm.” Or, in their case, a farm and some damn good neighbors.

Aaron Josinsky, cook, Misery Loves Co.
Winooski, Vermont
Website

photos by Dominic Perri

The post Cultivating Misery appeared first on Take Magazine.

Mohamad Hafez papers the walls of his New Haven, Connecticut, studio with printouts of news photos. The pictures show old women weeping and gesticulating; piles of rubble in narrow, ancient streets; young boys with a look of shock and sadness on their faces; rows of tanks; views from inside blown-out interiors; half-demolished apartment buildings; and throngs of huddled refugees awaiting food or rescue. The photos are from Syria, Hafez’s birthplace.

Hafez, 33, works as an architect, designing corporate high-rise skyscrapers for Pickard Chilton. That’s his day job. But in the evenings, on his off-hours and often late into the night, he comes to work on his visual art in his upstairs studio in the Westville Village Historic District section of New Haven, a few blocks from the Beth El–Keser Israel synagogue. Hafez makes detailed assemblages—scale models and sculptures—that generally hang on a wall. Many of Hafez’s pieces depict ripped-apart buildings, with dangling wires, bullet-riddled plaster, and crushed furniture. They’re like dollhouses that re-create the destruction of war rather than the comforts of domestic calm. Others are part of what Hafez calls his Baggage Series, which he makes using open suitcases of varying sizes, crammed with miniature items, sometimes including numerous tiny houses or fragments of dwellings.

Mohamad Hafez considers Unpacked Refugee Baggage: Ayman & Ghena, 2017, mixed media. Photo by Paul Specht

When he was 19 years old, enrolled as a first-year student at Iowa State University, Hafez took some of the skills he was learning in his architecture classes and eventually started applying them to intricate models of buildings from Damascus. The hobby served to ease his homesickness at the time. This was in 2004, before the civil war began in 2011, in which over four hundred thousand Syrians have died. This was before the humanitarian crisis that sent approximately one million Syrian refugees to Europe.

Having entered the United States with a one-time entry visa following an extensive background check, Hafez feared that being a Muslim from Syria named Mohamad might make reentry into the United States unlikely. So, for about seven years, Hafez channeled some of his longing for home and family into work that conjured Syria. As an architecture student, Hafez was understandably drawn to the layers of history and culture represented in the buildings of Damascus, with their meshed and stacked traditions and
aesthetics—Islamic, Byzantine, Roman, Hellenic, modern, and more. When the civil war began, Hafez, watching reports on TV and online, saw the material destruction as emblematic of the senseless human suffering that went along with it.

His artwork is a sort of visual lament. “There’s the personal component of this, in the sense that I am weeping over the death of my country and culture,” he says. “Well, how do you cope with that? How do you cope with thousands of years of culture and heritage and archaeological sites being bombed into dust in front of your eyes in a six-year vicious war, without a meaningful outcome being planned, or at least a light at the end of the tunnel? As a Syrian, as a Muslim, as an Arab, how do you cope with that while living in the diaspora?”

Hafez is quick to establish that his suffering—reading about the war in Syria and watching news reports from halfway around the world, agonizing from a distance—is nothing like that of those who are there. But, his predicament offers a peculiar kind of vantage point that increases the sting in some ways.

“To see your country deteriorate and see the whole picture from afar—that’s another torture in itself. Because when you’re in it, you’re just consumed with your day-to-day life,” he explains. “But when you’re outside of it, you get more of the whole big picture. You’re getting a taste of so many medicines. So the only way I figured I could cope with that was to get into these models, these sculptures.”

Hafez got to go back to Syria in 2011, right before the civil war erupted. But he hasn’t returned since. He says he’ll go again when things calm down.

Mohamad Hafez, Unpacked Refugee Baggage: Um Shaham, 2017, mixed media. Photo by Paul Specht

One could, theoretically, look at Hafez’s sculptures without any knowledge of his background or the specific subject of the work, and assume that the artist was somehow making Joseph Cornell-esque assemblages that aestheticize destruction or structural decay. Hafez recognizes the impulse, but it doesn’t motivate his work.

“I do surround myself with photos of the destruction just because . . . it’s not beautiful . . . it’s sophisticated,” he admits. “Destruction in itself is sophisticated, and the detail attracts you. There’s a sad and horrific component to it, but the way that buildings fall apart and the rubble, to the human eye, is mesmerizing. I don’t know why. Our dark side likes seeing things dismantled. It’s curiosity. My job is to remodel that curiosity and to tell you there are human beings living in there. So you see the laundry lines, you see birds’ nests, you see different hints of life that take place.”

Art is supposed to expand our sympathies. Hafez’s work can spur viewers to feel their way into a routine life—a mundane life, with clothes, dishes, furniture, houseplants, and neighbors—that has been upended and blasted apart by hostile, chaotic, and indifferent forces. Sometimes there are pieces of Koranic calligraphy spray-painted on crumbling facades. The phrases are inspirational, hopeful messages for believers, about justice and perseverance, but they also have the visual hint of revolutionary signals—as if simply surviving and retaining dignity were a kind of insurrection in the face of war and bomb blasts. Faith is almost seen as a form of defiance.

If he’s summoning chaos and dislocation in his work, Hafez finds a way to that place in his carefully ordered studio, playing the sad but meditative Persian violin music of Kayhan Kalhor, working into the night in a kind of trance. Neat bins and boxes of found objects are separated: driftwood here, plastic there, rusted metal in one container, shiny fuses in another. Glue guns and tools are stacked and arranged. Hafez doesn’t create in a jumble, even if what he creates resembles one.

Bricolage—art created by assembling media from multiple sources—is usually slightly crazed and off-kilter, but Hafez’s constructions have a strange obsessive realism. Hafez’s day job as an architect gives him a built-in sense of material and scale that contributes to the authentic feel of his war-torn miniatures and the substructures that get pulled into the light when a building is destroyed.

“You’re always trusting your artistic intuition and your architectural intuition,” he says, “in that if you’re modeling a building, you’re thinking ‘Does that look right? Is the thickness of the slab, the thickness of the wall, the proportion of the window to the floor, correct?’ That’s subconscious at this point. Because when you break a wall you expose rebar; when you break a floor you expose electrical and plumbing.”

When he’s designing corporate high-rises at Pickard Chilton, advance planning is central. But his visual art allows for much more spontaneity and freedom. Hafez might even be said to be improvising space.

“In my day job, we design every bit of detail in our architecture projects,” he explains. “When you start, you have a pretty darn good idea of where you’re headed. This work is so liberating in the sense that I just start building, making on the spot. If it looks right, fine; if it doesn’t, I’m ripping that off and throwing that on the floor.”

Hafez’s work has been shown around New England and the United States, as well as in the United Kingdom. A recent show at New Haven’s Artspace featured a collaborative series of pieces from Hafez and Ahmed Badr, an Iraqi-born writer who is now attending Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Together, the two interviewed refugees from the Middle East, Africa, and Afghanistan, collecting their stories and documenting their accounts of war, uprooting, wandering, resettling, and longing for home. The show, UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage, is a multimedia effort to humanize and individualize large-scale events that often get covered from a distance, or lost in the charged political debate in the United States today. Audio clips are woven together with Hafez’s constructions. The artists hope to redefine and expand the meaning and associations of the word refugee in twenty-first-century America.

Mohamad Hafez. Photo by Paul Specht

To create his work—to make it with the right force—Hafez feels like he needs to channel some of the suffering. “I feel a responsibility,” he says. “If I want that emotion to come through honestly in the work, then I have to be that emotion for that amount of time and put it in the work.”

The keening instrumental music on the stereo helps him focus. Hafez says he “latches” with it. “First what I’ll do is look at a lot of photos. I look at what happened—I remind myself,” he describes. “I look at the photos of kids, of refugees, of dead people on the streets, of our devastation, in order to absorb that and put it into sculpture.”

Mohamad Hafez
New Haven, Connecticut
Website

All photos by Paul Specht

The post Dislocations appeared first on Take Magazine.

The dilapidated Lupinewood mansion is perched atop a winding hill in Greenfield, Massachusetts, overlooking the Connecticut River Valley. Once the lavish estate of the wealthy Peabody family, today Lupinewood exists as a collective of artists, organizers, educators, and health-care providers who are majority trans and queer—all living and working to establish a mutually supportive space for members and transient guests. They collaborate on art and share living spaces, income, food, knowledge, and intertwining intimate relationships, while always prioritizing their core tenets of sanctuary, convergence, and confrontation.

The 6,000-square-foot home and its 4.02 acres of land, which exists on colonized Pocumtuc territory, is a complicated haven for its eight members. Though the collective has existed in some form or another for about seven years, they didn’t truly have a safe and productive home until January 2017, when the group finally moved into Lupinewood.

To learn more about Lupinewood, we asked the collective what existing at Lupinewood means to them, and what they believe is possible at this place.

Cea Wiley of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Cea Wiley

Because I’m an herbalist, Lupinewood is a wild paradox for me. It’s a former robber baron’s mansion reclaimed by queer radical artists and organizers; the land, once manicured to perfection, has been reclaimed by plants growing any way they please; the inground swimming pool is getting swallowed by vines. It’s a fairy tale—it’s Robin Hood! Yet, here I am, a white person “owning” and living in structures erected on land stolen by white colonizers through genocide. As I pull weeds out of the gardens here, I think of the ways in which I am an invader myself.

I am starting a low-cost apothecary at Lupinewood, and want to develop a community clinic from it, with the aim of providing alternative health care to low-income folks. I’m setting up a medicinal garden, from which I can source medicine for the clinic, as well as for the street medic and medic trainer work to support front-line struggles. I want Lupinewood’s colonized land to materially combat the corrosion of capitalism on people’s bodies. I want it overrun with at-risk and endangered plants, plants that can be supportive of a complex and generative ecosystem. Additionally, I hope to use this place to host conferences and convergences with other radical health-care workers, using them to deepen the discourse around what it means to live within paradoxes, even as we fight them.

Aurora Rainer of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Aurora Rainer

There’s a long tradition of queers building alternative families and domestic structures. Many folks have had to: their biological families cut them loose, over and over; the domestic models they were handed couldn’t fit them. So many queer people have needed, historically, to be artists. They’ve needed to craft realities for themselves, their friends, and their partners.

I see myself as humbly continuing this tradition through Lupinewood. I am a painter by trade and have a painting studio here, where I make art about queer love and how trans-femininity lives in my white settler body. I take care of the beehives and I apprentice as an

herbalist, tending the food, medicine, and pollinator gardens here. I also help oversee our collective kitchen, keeping track of bulk orders and supply needs, trying to ensure there’s enough soup and tea for whoever’s catching a cold or working overtime. All of these projects are about queer, radical homemaking to me. They’re about crafting a reality in which my partners and friends can thrive, despite the obstacles the dominant culture gives them.

As a femme who grew up believing I could not occupy a feminine position, it’s deeply cathartic to engage directly in this feminized labor. And as a woman committed to social struggle, it is deeply healing, and deeply political, to imagine ways this labor can happen outside the oppressive frameworks in which capitalism has always placed femme labor.

Alyssa Kai of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Alyssa Kai

From a fascist right emboldened by Trump to the waves of evictions in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire, collective spaces of sanctuary, cultural production, and political action are under attack and more important than ever to defend and grow. I came up in such spaces, moving through the constellations of DIY living and performance venues on tour with one

musical project or another, stepping into the lush worlds generated by the activity they housed. For me and countless others, DIY spaces are exceptional places of experimentation that generate microcultures resilient to the challenges of political conflict, and provide points of refuge for people whose identities are under constant attack.

Since we moved in on New Year’s Eve, Lupinewood has quickly become a node for networks of queer and politicized projects circulating around the continent. We have an agency here that many collective spaces don’t have the luxury of wielding: agency over the safety of the space, over the ways it gets used and built out, over the reliability of a future here. Because of this, Lupinewood feels poised to be a particularly powerful and long-running space as both a safe haven for embattled people and a flywheel for the folks and projects that pass through here, whether for a day or a year. And as stewards of this place, we have made a collective commitment to each other: that we will work to keep it that way, in perpetuity.

Noel’le Longhaul of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Noel’le Longhaul

My personal art and tattoo practice grew out of my life as a transient younger punk, not yet having come out as trans, dissociated from where I came from and who I was. Riding trains across the country, I began tattooing elaborate, enchanted houses and landscapes on the transient and often similarly dissociated friends I met, while the literal homes and landscapes around me blurred. I was fundamentally ungrounded, and it took an immense toll on my body and spirit.

Lupinewood is an enchanted landscape. Its architecture is magical; it is thickly wooded and surrounded by wandering paths through the trees, and both the house and the land it sits on mirror the imagery in my work, sometimes uncannily. But it is also an actual place that I wake up to. It gives me the resources I need to regenerate my body so I can continue tattooing and art-making with the intensity that my practice demands.

One of the most crucial—and rare—resources it provides is a shared life with a collective of people who are my partners, friends, and artistic collaborators. The ability to move fluidly between making meals and making art together feels alchemical. It magnifies the meaning of the cultural production, turning a tattoo or a print into an artifact of a shared experience. And it turns daily routines into domestic rituals, which deepen in significance as more people stay here, cook here, receive medicine here, and use this place to ground themselves before making their next move.

beyon wren moor of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

beyon wren moor

As a two-spirit mixed Cree and Ukrainian settler now living on occupied Pocumtuc territory, I have no rights in this place called Lupinewood. The white settler promise of “human rights” has never included me or my people, and I know the safeties and comforts promised by such rights are on the same spectrum as feelings of entitlement. For me, Lupinewood is a place of responsibility: to care for the land and the people whose ancestors feed the trees and rivers here.

In the seven months since I arrived, Lupinewood has been a site of security and healing for me, an experience that sits uneasily alongside the knowledge of desperate indigenous struggles elsewhere. Before Lupinewood, and in between living at the Unist’ot’en Camp, Standing Rock, and on other front lines across so-called british columbia, I had been collecting the words and stories of 14indigenous women and two-spirit land defenders. With the help of my longtime collaborator, I am in the process of illustrating, hand-printing, and binding their words into a book describing what land defense looks like in their 14 respective nations. When finished, we plan to sell the book as one of many efforts to support their fight.

I have spent most of my life struggling for indigenous sovereignty and the defense of land, and I intend to use Lupinewood as a point of retreat and convergence for myself and other indigenous land defenders, as well as a tool to rally resources from the relative wealth of this area for front-line struggles.

Nick Berger of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Nick Berger

I’m a non-binary trans artist and musician who’s been living and organizing collectively for the past decade. The punk, queer, and organizing scenes I came up in were vibrant and chaotic, full of glorious aspirations and attempts to combat the massive power structures we recognized as the source of so much violence and pain. Simultaneously, these scenes had strong tendencies toward guilt and self-negation; the people in them were constantly prioritizing action at the expense of their own well-being. We were throwing ourselves at the problems we saw, but there was no space to heal the wounds this inevitably gave us.

As I’ve watched this dynamic happen, I’ve realized that many of us have a deeply internalized sense of disposability toward our bodies and relationships. Living within the capitalist, white, cis-het patriarchy means learning to commoditize lived experiences, and though many radicals are aware of and critical of this, it runs deep. What does it mean to stay in one place, even as one’s trauma catches up to them? What does it mean to consider a set of relationships, beyond perhaps a single romantic partnership, non-disposable? At Lupinewood, I want to work toward reconnecting basic self-care and mutual aid to the labor of organizing work. I want Lupinewood to engage a broader network of collective projects that are genuinely effective politically, and genuinely trauma-informed and care-oriented.

Terran Nullius of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Terran Nullius

I’ve worked with immigrants and refugees for the past nine years. I coordinate a site where classes and counseling services are free to non-native English speakers. These folks create a place together that is beautiful and worthy of defending, even as this country’s political culture turns against them.

We moved into Lupinewood as Trump was getting elected, with his bluster about a border wall and mass deportations. As we started unpacking our boxes here, the national conversation was decidedly about displacement.

Like my classroom, Lupinewood is about the creation and defense of place.

I’m not an immigrant. I’m white, U.S.-born, and live on stolen land. My relationship to place is privileged in many respects. Even with my privileges, finding a secure place has been incredibly hard. Being trans, polyamorous, lower class, and saddled with student debt have all led to years of unsafe, unstable, and ugly living situations for me and so many of the people I’m close to.

I want Lupinewood to create a place for people who more often battle displacement. I want to make it safe and strong, with the ability to offer shelter on short notice. I want to leverage Lupinewood’s privileges into infrastructure to support those who lack it. I want to make it physically beautiful, the kind of space people without power usually cannot access. I want to build a place worthy of defense.

Andrew Huckins of Lupinewood. Photo by Caleb Cole

Andrew Huckins

I believe that architecture subtly defines the limits of what’s possible, whether one is trying to change the world, simply get out of bed in the morning, or both. I’m thinking not just of physical space, but of cultural, economic, political, and social space as well. Whether it’s a local bylaw that recognizes only heteronuclear definitions of family, or the behavioral norms enforced by one’s peers, these architectures define paths of least resistance that lead inexorably toward a broken status quo.

The seven years I’ve spent working to realize Lupinewood have been a practice in forging paths that diverge from those of least resistance, and toward making resistance part of Lupinewood’s architectural DNA. Beyond the particular acts of resistance enacted by our collective and its networks, Lupinewood is, for me, the first major step on a lifelong path of creating, growing, and defending alternatives to the well-trodden walkways this civilization has wandered down.

I see Lupinewood growing into a deep resource for the upcoming struggles that our communities face. Building a kitchen capable of cooking for large groups of people, setting up a communal wood and metal shop, creating space for political organizers and their projects—while these are some of the specific next steps that I’m excited about, I feel most moved by Lupinewood’s broader potential to support, rather than suppress, the wisdom and power of those on the receiving end of systems of abusive violence.

Lupinewood

Greenfield, Massachusetts

Website

Photos by Caleb Cole

The post Building Sanctuary appeared first on Take Magazine.

Close your eyes and imagine for a moment: a restaurant, dimly lit and cozy. Step up to the bar and appreciate the array of bottles—filled with elixirs as yet unknown to you. The bartender asks for, and fulfills, a request for a cocktail based on a feeling or flavor. You enjoy a meal crafted around local flavors, house-made ferments, and a chef’s creativity.

Open your eyes. You could be in any major metro center, but you’re in Manchester, New Hampshire, at The Birch on Elm, a jewel box of a restaurant owned and operated by Nick Provencher and Joel Soucy. Provencher helms the kitchen while Soucy oversees a bar program built on classic cocktails elevated with house-made tinctures, juices, and garnishes.

A selection of house-made syrups and infusions at The Birch on Elm. Photo by Dominic Perri

Provencher and Soucy are focused on sharing their vision for hospitality with their community—but why not settle in Boston, Portsmouth, or Portland? These cities are known for their restaurant scenes and continue to draw culinary talent. But for these two visionaries, Manchester beckoned. Provencher was introduced to the Queen City when he joined the team at Portsmouth-based executive chef Matt Provencher’s (no relation) new Manchester gastropub, The Foundry. Soucy worked at bars throughout Manchester for years before he joined The Foundry’s bar team. The two realized that they shared a similar perspective on hospitality and restaurants, and decided a joint venture would be the logical next step.

A brick-lined restaurant space on Elm Street became available, and the pair jumped on it quickly. Soucy recalls, “We talked about looking at spaces in Portsmouth, but saw an opportunity to do this someplace it wasn’t happening already. We could make an impact here instead of adding to an existing restaurant scene.” Provencher adds, “We also wanted to be somewhere that could serve locals and didn’t have a lot of seasonal traffic.” The Birch on Elm was born in September 2016.

Joel Soucy pours a Ramos Gin Fizz. Photo by Dominic Perri

The culinary vision at The Birch on Elm is a collaboration between the kitchen and the bar. Soucy describes a drink from their summer list: the Cardstock Paper Plane. He infused the aperitif Aperol with cantaloupe, which was in steady supply in the kitchen, and built the infusion into a house cocktail. Flavors, ideas, and techniques are shared across the food and drink menus. As a result, the bar program and the dinner menu work together as well as Soucy and Provencher do.

Soucy has been highlighting tiki drinks at the bar. While ersatz versions of Painkillers, Zombies, and Mai Tais may be familiar to most from visits to restaurants that feature pu-pu platters and sweet-and-sour meatballs, Soucy restores them to their original glory. “If we can buy it, we try to figure out how to make it,” he says. His team makes hard-to-find cocktail ingredients like orgeat (an almond syrup) and falernum (a lime zest and clove syrup) and shakes them into cocktails that pack a wallop without cloying sweetness. With the Chartreuse Swizzle, Soucy builds on that tiki tradition by shaking freshly squeezed juice with Yellow Chartreuse—bridging the gap between traditional tiki and modern mixology.

Bobby Vegetal, one of Birch on Elm’s signature cocktails. Photo by Dominic Perri

Provencher takes a similar traditional-meets-modern approach in the kitchen. “I like to play around a lot with textures,” he says. “I play mostly with basic flavor profiles and finding balance between them. There are some surprises that pop up that people don’t understand . . . but then you eat it and it makes sense.” Like many successful chefs, Provencher has chosen to describe each dish on his menu not with a fulsome description, but with a list of its ingredients.

The gin-based Aviation cocktail alongside a plate of Grilled Street Corn. Photo by Dominic Perri

Grilled Street Corn is described as “whipped miso butter, pickled onion, peanut,” Provencher explains.
“It’s got roasted peanuts for crunch, pickled onions for that sour note, sweet corn, and whipped miso butter—salty and fermented. Take one bite together and it balances out.” Other dishes show off their sourcing of local ingredients with a nod to the local suppliers they patronize. A green bean dish and the crab cakes both namecheck Dunk’s Mushrooms. Dunk is a mushroom grower who appeared at The Birch on Elm bearing boxes of ’shrooms shortly after the restaurant opened. Provencher has been a customer ever since, and Dunk’s mushrooms have become a feature on the menu.

Chef Nick Provencher. Photo by Dominic Perri

One item that shows off Provencher and Soucy’s playful side is the Brookford Farm Burger, which contains “pickled farm veggies, farm cheddar, hand-formed farm patty, hand-punched fries [aka hand-cut local potatoes], Wonder Bread & Heinz, America!” Soucy lights up as he describes it. “It’s a local beef patty, topped with local cheese, but then we top it with Heinz ketchup and serve it on Wonder Bread. It’s perfect!”

After a year in business, the team is still working long days and continuing to refine their seasonally changing menus. But that doesn’t mean they’ll let moss grow under their feet. When asked what’s next, Provencher and Soucy’s eyes light up at the restaurants they could build in the city they’ve chosen as their own. They aren’t talking on the record yet, but they have plans for one addition—or more—to the Birch on Elm family. Until then, there’s a comfortable seat, a cold drink, and a delicious dish waiting at your table on Elm Street.

A deconstructed Loaded Baked Potato. Photo by Dominic Perri

Nick Provencher and Joel Soucy–co-owners, The Birch on Elm
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Website

Top image: Grilled Octopus. Photo by Dominic Perri

The post Branching Out appeared first on Take Magazine.

Mathewson Street United Methodist Church is one of many religious buildings entrenched in the fabric of downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Located on a transitional block, the church faces a row of empty storefronts, one of which bears a sign promising that the long-shuttered Chinese restaurant Dragon 2000 will someday reopen as a gay nightclub called Dragon. The church building is notable from the outside for the huge mural adorning its left side: a man in a pineapple-and-pizza-print shirt tossing some sort of ring in the air. A mouse loiters by his ear.

While passers-by should be forgiven for ignoring the posted church bulletins, it’s immediately clear that something different is going on here. And it is: the church’s top floor features a 1,300-square-foot black box theater. It’s also the home of OUT LOUD Theatre, one of Rhode Island’s most forward-thinking theater companies.

Kira Hawridge. Photo by Ian Travis Barnard

Kira Hawkridge founded OUT LOUD five years ago after graduating from the University of Rhode Island. A Pawtucket native, Hawkridge has a theatrical pedigree. Her parents are local theater vets who ran NewGate Theatre, a company that 20 years ago performed in the same church where OUT LOUD performs today. “I grew up in that building,” Hawkridge says.

Is it unusual for a theater artist to start her own company immediately after college? Perhaps. But OUT LOUD is not a normal company. “It’s a lab environment,” Hawkridge describes, “and a support system for artists who are well versed in craft, in doing and observing.” More specifically, OUT LOUD is a company that’s increasingly centered on movement. Not dance per se, but the physicality of performers who aren’t formally trained in dance.

The company’s three annual productions are always united by a common theme. Two years ago, for instance, the season focused on the public domain—plays were performed for free by volunteer actors, with no money allotted for sets, costumes, or performance rights. (They did Antigone, Dracula, and Coriolanus.)

Ottavia De Luca as The Woman in The Yellow Wallpaper (2017). Photo by Piquant Photo

Last summer, the company presented an original adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892
feminist classic, The Yellow Wallpaper. Performed with minimal dialogue, the Victorian-era chronicle of postpartum depression was told in four parts over four consecutive nights, with a different actor playing the unnamed woman each night. Before each show, audience members rode up the church’s jaunty, nautical-themed elevator (which features a plaque dedicated to the elevator operator who used to run it). They were then handed cups of water and shuffled into a makeshift doctor’s waiting room, complete with copies of Highlights magazine, to wait for the show to begin.

“The Yellow Wallpaper was our first experiment in physicalizing a preexisting story,” explains Hawkridge. “It was a yearlong process.” The four nearly silent pieces were each brief but powerful, with each performer revolving around the stage in choreographed dissonance, reflecting the main character’s inner turmoil.

Hawkridge won’t take credit for the adaptation. “It was a collaborative process, so I don’t consider myself the writer,” she says. “I’m more of a guide for people to find things already in themselves. That dynamic seems more truthful than saying I’m the writer that adapted the story. The group is very gracious with vision.”

Natasha Cole as Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade (2017). Photo by Piquant Photo

Reviews were overwhelmingly positive. “We’re always in the mode of asking how we can be more effective,” she explains. “With The Yellow Wallpaper, we ask how it can be stronger. It can always grow. With Marat/Sade, we did it and put it to bed.” Marat/Sade was their spring show, and their largest to date. The cast featured 17 actors, plus a piano player and a stage manager who were both incorporated into the show. Peter Weiss’s 1963 play, set in a nineteenth-century mental hospital, is epic in every way. (Even the full title is overwhelming: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.)

“We do themed seasons,” Hawkridge says, “so the audience grows and changes. We’ve built up a core subscriber base, who go for our approach to each theme rather than the theme itself.” Season five’s theme was madness, and it wrapped up in November with a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. She cast Alan Hawkridge, her father, as Shakespeare’s ruler, driven to madness by his daughters.

“I love working with my dad,” she admits. “We’ve always had an easy, collaborative process, and we also challenge each other in creative ways. Obviously I’m biased because he’s my dad, but he’s a great actor. He connects you on a journey with each character.” Both Hawkridge and her father wanted to emphasize the mental aspects of the play. “The focus is zoning in on Lear’s mind, bringing the audience into his madness. The language is so viscerally potent.” And again, the play will feature a lot of movement. “The idea is to digest Shakespeare’s language, absorb it, and translate it into physical language,” she states.

Kira’s father, Alan Hawkridge, in King Lear (2017). Photo by Piquant Photo

OUT LOUD appeared at a time when a number of theaters popped up more or less simultaneously in Rhode Island, like Epic Theatre Company, Contemporary Theater Company, and Burbage Theatre Company. The artistic directors are all friendly and frequently work together. Hawkridge, for instance, regularly directs shows at Epic Theatre Company, adding her own personal touches. “It’s a part of how I tell stories,” she says, describing why she incorporates signature elements of her own work into productions she stages for other companies. For example, when Epic Theatre Company brought her in for Tennessee Williams’s saucy Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she left the lead character on stage for the whole show, drunk and passed out on the floor when he wasn’t called on to act. The play’s two halves each opened with a wordless group dance.

Unlike most companies, OUT LOUD works its season around a calendar year, rather than the traditional fall/spring season. “That actually started because a lot of our company members were still in school,” Hawkridge recalls. “So people had summers free.”

At this point, there are six main ensemble members. “This is the smallest ensemble that we’ve worked with,” she says. “By design.” Season six, the 2018 season, focuses on collaboration and the specificity of collectively creating material. After a year of studying mental illness, this season will be a lot brighter. “This season’s going to be light and joyous, with elements of fantasy and unreality.”

Well, mostly. Escape is an original piece about the grief a woman experiences when her twin brother dies. “This is really influenced by the core ensemble wanting to explore the specificity of grief,” Hawkridge explains. “It’s about finding joy after trauma. We began with the subject of twins and let it ripple out from there.” Escape was conceived by Hawkridge and she will direct it, but it will be choreographed collectively by the ensemble. The play features a woman and the ghost of her brother, as well as surrounding figures (a partner, a mother, a therapist). There will be little to no dialogue.

Beth Alianiello in King Lear (2017). Photo by Piquant Photo

The two other shows of the sixth season will be more familiar to theatergoers: Wonder is inspired by Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books—that one will be “interactive and sensory,” according to Hawkridge. Dream is an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Unusually, they’re performing the entire season at once. After six solid months of rehearsals, all three shows will be performed in June 2018. That’s a busy time for the arts in Providence: PVDFest covers the downtown area the first weekend of the month, and two weeks later, the city will be overtaken by a nighttime Pride parade. It’s a shining moment for the downtown, specifically right around Mathewson Street, and Hawkridge hopes OUT LOUD will add to the momentum.

Kira Hawkridge–founder OUT LOUD THEATRE
Providence, Rhode Island
Website

Top image: Sarah Leach as The Woman in The Yellow Wallpaper (2017). Photo by Piquant Photo

The post Getting Physical appeared first on Take Magazine.

Even though we at Take get to look at art made by different New England artists all day long, we are still regularly, pleasantly surprised by the work of someone new—or several someones, as you’ll see here in our third annual listing of artists to watch.

We asked curators from esteemed galleries and museums to tell us about artists they’ve been especially impressed by lately who deserve a wider audience, and were thrilled to get input from Trevor Smith, curator of the Present Tense, and Lydia Gordon, assistant curator for exhibitions and research, both at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts; Elizabeth Spavento, visual arts programmer at SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine; Lindsey Stapleton, codirector of GRIN in Providence, Rhode Island; Suzette McAvoy, executive director and chief curator at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine; Will K. Wilkins, executive director of Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut; and Alan Chong, director and CEO of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire.

With such an illustrious panel, we know you’ll want to keep an eye on these artists in the coming year—and beyond.

Nicole Duennebier

Nicole Duennebier, Still Life with Meat Pile, 2017, acrylic on panel, 24 × 30 in. Photo by Christian Skorik

A bona fide New Englander, Duennebier was born in Hartford, went to college in Maine, and now lives in Boston. “Riffing off the formal tradition of Dutch still lifes, Duennebier is obsessed with excess and growing, throbbing masses,” says Gordon. “Yet, she spends a great amount of time on delicate surface treatments, complete with glimmers of gold and super fine detail. They’re repellant and beautiful at the same time.”

Duennebier has been experimenting with making clay models to help her visualize specific forms and textures in her paintings. The results of this process, including a brighter color palette, will be on display in a solo show at 13FOREST Gallery in Arlington, Massachusetts, in May.

Heather McPherson

Heather McPherson, Bupropion, 2016, painted chiffon, cast epoxy, drawing pad, 36 × 20 in. Photo by Karen Philippe

Although she freely incorporates colorful sheets of chiffon, puddles of clear epoxy, and plexiglass sheets into her work, “Heather is a painter inside and out, whether she’s making traditional paintings or animating a video—it doesn’t seem to matter,” says Stapleton. “Her language is recognizable as her own, full of history and self-reference.”

McPherson, who is based in Providence, makes decisions through the physical, experimental process of making, but that’s not to imply her work is only about mixing materials. In the pieces she’s currently creating, she’s exploring the ways art has been used throughout history as a spiritual tool.

“Last time we were in her studio, she had an enviable pile of massive primed canvases on her wall,” Stapleton says. “Something astounding is going to be on those bad boys next time we’re there, I just know it.”

Dell M. Hamilton

Dell M. Hamilton, To Haunt Is To Love: Reina #6, from Fallen Angels: Making Sense Out of Nothing, 2014–present, color film and unique digital scan on paper, 25 × 37 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

A true interdisciplinarian, Boston-based Hamilton has been tackling topics as diverse as the United States’ influence on Honduras and the history of desegregation in Boston through performance, writing, installation, curation, and more. Gordon recalls, “I had the pleasure of witnessing Hamilton perform at Boston University’s 808 Gallery. Sharing a contemporary response to historical narratives steeped in collective trauma and memory, her gestural performance involved thinking, making, and doing at the service of imagining a better future. It was really a transformative viewing experience.”

At press time, Hamilton was in the middle of producing a body of two-dimensional work called Punta: Pregunta (translated as Point: Question). She’s exploring the intricate tangles of family identity, trauma, and personal neuroses through large-scale, flat, mixed-media artwork, though she isn’t sure how two-dimensional they will stay.

Sarah Tortora

Sarah Tortora, Last Bastion of the Loser, 2016, steel, felt, cotton, hardware, 54 × 46 × 72 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

Vermont-based Tortora “is a machine, and her sculptures are the real deal,” Stapleton says. “Her craft and execution is always impeccable. She was making pretty massive work last year, but we’ve seen some small, intimate pieces on her social media that look outstanding.” (Look for her on Instagram.)

Past work includes painted wood wall pieces that resemble letter forms from an unknown language, and full-size abstractions that hint at marching soldiers or classical architecture. “One of my favorite things about her process is how she titles her work,” Stapleton continues. Titles such as Septum, Pallbearers, and Power Bottom “really solidify each sculpture’s identity in a way I haven’t experienced,” she explains. For 2018, she’s developing a new series of sculptures titled Witness Mark, which will reference the way museums illustrate geological time.

Belleau + Churchill

Belleau + Churchill, The Red Ghost, part of Fantasia Colorado, 2016, mixed media, 18 x 132 x 72 in. Photo by Caleb Churchill

This artist pair from Providence was nominated by two members of our panel. Raina Belleau and Caleb Churchill “make interesting work about history and the environment. They are sweet individuals and masterful craftspeople,” says Spavento.

“We are really into how their projects are visually interesting and accessible while ultimately being heavily research-based,” adds Stapleton. “The work is fun, but still challenging.” For a 2016 installation titled Fantasia Colorado, the pair created memorabilia such as “vintage” postcards, handmade rugs, and historic portrait busts to re-create and commemorate an odd piece of American history: a failed attempt by the U.S. Army to use camels as pack animals in the Civil War; the ultimate release of the animals into the wild; and the terrifying, truth-stretching stories of camel–human encounters that ensued.

“2017 has been a lot of residency and research work, and we’re really excited to see what comes out of that time spent in development,” Stapleton says. Indeed; as of press time, the two were planning to study the concept of utopias—and learn Esperanto, a language created in the 1800s in the optimistic hope of unifying the world—at the Wassaic Artist Residency in Wassaic, New York, in October. 2018 will see their second solo exhibition at GRIN in Providence.

Hong Hong

Hong Hong, Passage II, 2017, cellophane, wood, steel, 8 x 228 x 144 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

Born in China, Hong immigrated to the United States at the age of nine and now calls Hartford home. Working with materials as humble as mulberry fiber, mylar, Scotch tape, and fishing line, Hong creates large-scale pieces that suggest, interact with, and (when made with mylar) literally reflect their environment. She’s been making massive sheets of paper—as tall as 12 feet—using buckets and water pistols to manipulate pulp on homemade screens. Far from being precious about her finished pieces, Hong has no qualms about taking work that’s been shown and resoaking it, turning the paper back into a slurry of fiber that can be reused and remade. The work becomes cyclical, self-feeding. Wilkins says, “Hong Hong delves into the mysteries of deep time, even as her work is imbued with the sensuous presence of here and now.”

Hong had a solo show at Real Art Ways that ran from August through October, and she has an ongoing relationship with the Hartford arts organization. “We are commissioning a new work titled Everlasting Ephemera, which she will be working on during the coming year,” says Wilkins. The piece is a yearlong investigation of the temporal nature of human perception, and how those parameters affect our environment and our culture.

Farzaneh and Bahareh Safarani

Farzaneh and Bahareh Safarani, a still from Cocoon, performed at the Boston Center for the Arts, 2015. Photo by Hannah Bates

Having trained as painters at the University of Tehran, twin sisters Farzaneh and Bahareh have been branching out into video and performance while they continue their studies in Boston. The Safaranis use their twin-ness to full advantage, acting as each other’s mirrors or as dual selves on stage. “In their melding of meticulous realistic painting, extraordinary performative discipline, and the most exquisitely subtle use of video, the Safarani sisters create an uncanny sense of intimacy,” says Smith.

And it is truly a melding. The two decide which form their art takes—painting, live performance, both—by determining which will explain their idea better. They’re now hard at work on a series of paintings that each act as a paragraph in a larger story, but performance will certainly be a part of their future. In 2018, you can see their internationally recognized work in Los Angeles, Berlin, Armenia, and Iran.

Emilie Stark-Menneg

Emilie Stark-Menneg, Big Kitty Picture Show!, 2016, acrylic, oil, house paint, and sand on canvas, 70 x 105 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

Stark-Menneg was enthusiastically chosen by two of our curators. Spavento says, “Her paintings are delightful, expressive and totally singular in their vision and content. I would recommend her for everything—I’m so in love with her work.” McAvoy agrees, “Stark-Menneg is one of the freshest and most exciting young painters I’ve encountered in a while. Her work is smart, sassy, inventive, and skillful all at once, plus it is a hell of a lot of fun.”

A Massachusetts native, Stark-Menneg was based in Brunswick, Maine, until recently, when she relocated to Providence to enter an MFA program at RISD. At school, she plans to continue to explore ways to depict the shared energy found between people and places, and to examine how technology distorts and relocates our physical bodies.

Wang Yefeng (Frank)

Wang Yefeng, a screenshot from Drifting Stages, 2016, dimensions variable

Wang is a digital media artist whose surreal, disorienting animation should really be seen in motion to be fully appreciated. In one of his video pieces, generic, vaguely Asian MIDI music backs a tableau of Hooters waitresses with C-3PO heads holding meat grinders that cascade blood onto a plastic toy figure of a man in a suit, who’s lying in a bathtub with pigs’ feet, and . . . well, it’s better to visit his website and see it for yourself.

As a Rhode Island–based digital media artist with a sculptural background, Wang has been recently rediscovering his love of working with physical materials, including 3D-printed objects. Over the coming year, he plans to experiment further with mixing multiple disciplines to discover the best ways to make his ideas real.

“He’s making work unlike what we typically see in New England, probably in part because he splits his time between the United States and China,” Stapleton says. “There’s always a narrative—usually a surprising, semi-autobiographical one—behind his work, but it never gets too personal. There’s reservation in his lavishness, and now that he’s back in the States for a while, we’re looking forward to what he will come up with.”

Vivian Beer

Vivian Beer, Forth Bench, 2011, stainless steel, pure pigment, ferrocement, 96 x 48 x 48 in. Photo by Alison Swiatocha

While not unknown to us—Take profiled Beer last December, following her win on Ellen’s Design Challenge, a furniture designers’ competition à la Project Runway—Beer’s work isn’t as well known as it should be. “Vivian Beer is an exciting local artist who is pushing the boundaries of furniture making,” says Chong. “Inspired by various forms, from airplanes to high heels, her industrial chic work is both strong and beautiful.”

The streamlined, retro-industrial shapes in Beer’s work are clearly informed by her 2014 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum—a fitting place for an artist working primarily in materials such as steel, cement, and automotive paint. “Her inventive and stylish forms have crossover appeal between functional furniture and sculptural works of art,” continues Chong.

Over the last year, Beer has been sharing her appealing design skills through teaching residencies and public art commissions across the country. She also moved her furniture studio from Manchester to Pembroke, New Hampshire, where she plans to build out a space for holding design workshops. As for the work itself, Beer will be developing a line of limited-production furniture (all of her previous pieces are one-of-a-kind) in the spring.

top image: L to R: Wang Yefeng, Dell M. Hamilton, Farzaneh Safarani, and Bahareh Safarani. Photo by Izzy Berdan; composite image by Aaron Taylor-Waldman

The post Artists to Watch in 2018 appeared first on Take Magazine.

Nine-year-old Arien Wilkerson stands on his grandmother’s porch, popping, locking, and dancing along to the jeers of his North End neighborhood friends who yell, “Do the Michael Jackson! Do the Michael Jackson!” This makes Wilkerson’s mother wary. If her son bends to their will now, then who knows what they’ll get him to do later in life? “My mom would say, ‘Stop putting on a show for people; this isn’t HBO!’” Wilkerson remembers. “‘They want HBO, they can go watch it in their living room!’”

Nearly 16 years later, Wilkerson is walking through his favorite spots in the North End of Hartford. It’s a neighborhood pegged with familiar labels like “pretty rough part of town,” “scary,” and, according to a notable Hartford publication, “one of the capital city’s neediest areas.” Wilkerson doesn’t deny this perception, especially when he points to specific spots on his block: the place he found a dead body; a backyard where he saw his neighbor being chased by police; the corner where his childhood friend, Kerry Foster Jr., was shot 13 times.

It’d be easy to think of Wilkerson as someone who’s persevered as a dancer despite his disadvantaged surroundings. But it’s his life in the North End, with all its complexities, that yields the knowledge he taps into when choreographing performances and connecting with a live audience. “My energy and my purpose, my ’hood-ness, my queerness, my blackness—it all definitely comes from these streets,” he says.

Wilkerson in Hartford’s North End, Connecticut, by Brittany Solem

Wilkerson started dancing at the Artists Collective when he was 12 years old. He speculates that his mom brought him to dance because of a heavy suspicion that her son was queer (her hunch was correct, as it turns out). She figured the arts could provide her boisterous child with a safe space for expression and even social mobility.

After just one class, head instructor Jolette Creary demanded that Wilkerson come back. “People are born with some type of supreme talent, and I was born with this inner cunning, and a desire to be on stage and map it out. Jolette knew,” explains Wilkerson. “The minute I hit the stage, it was a wrap.” He danced in his first show one week later. Wilkerson quickly became Creary’s star student, assistant, and rehearsal director. This success led him to the unprecedented position of entering Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts in his senior year of high school.

Deborah Goffe, dance maker and director of Scapegoat Garden, was impressed with Wilkerson even before she saw him dance. “There was a way that he was watching the dance that seemed to be beyond his years, and deeply attuned to what is possible in dance.” Goffe has worked with Wilkerson since these early years, and is clear about the nature of their bond. “Back and forth between teacher and mentor, but also as a colleague. Iron sharpening iron, in some ways.

“He’s dynamic and a gorgeous performer,” she continues. “He really cuts through space in a way that’s compelling for people.”

Wilkerson hangs out in one of his childhood haunts, Willie Ware Park. By Brittany Solem

Wilkerson dances with seamless variety, marrying nearly a dozen disparate styles of dance in just a few awesome moments. “Movement can be so enticing, attractive, hypnotic, and so alluring,” says Wilkerson. “I dance for the dogs a lot”—his grandma has two teenie mutts—“and they love it; they sit and watch. They’re so intent. You can hone somebody like that.”

This fluidity and variety is not exclusive to his approach to movement. In the same way Wilkerson transitions from modern dance to breakdancing to ballet to jazz to West African dance, he’ll take you on a winding conversational ride in which he shamelessly professes his love for barebacking in the same moment he hands you a book on labanotation (a system to analyze and record human movement). His performative affect never wanes and is in constant flux.

His time at the Artists Collective and the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts certainly shaped Wilkerson. But it was Israel that birthed the transgressive queer consciousness and playful approach to identity that sets him apart from other dancers. “I was sitting at home, dreaming of wearing dresses and skirts,” he recalls. “When I went [to Israel] and I saw the fashion and all the gender-fluid people and all these big-ass, beardy, tattooed punk dudes fucking gender-fluid men, I was like, ‘Oh, this is hot.’ It was then and there that I knew I could be myself, and someone would love me crucially.

“I was more like Kanye in high school,” he continues. “But when I went to Israel and came back, I realized I can be Mykki Blanco. I can be Junglepussy. I can be an intelligent, brown, queer, forward person who doesn’t have to rationalize who I am and what I want.” Undeniably, our social institutions present a specific set of challenges for individuals who are unapologetically intelligent, brown or black, queer and forward. Even Wilkerson, with his endlessly candid joy and intense work ethic, cannot fend off all the flies buzzing around the stinking pile that is institutional racism.  

“I’ve been there,” says Goffe. “I’ve been the only choreographer of color in Hartford who gets ignored.”

Wilkerson responds to this fucked-up system by divesting from institutions that do not want to understand his message. On social media, he posts detailed call-outs about the lack of access and visibility for people of color in Hartford’s performing arts scene. “I try to have more tact than I used to have,” he admits.

Some people find his approach to critiquing these structures confusing, because part of his audience is white. Wilkerson explains, “The white folks who come to my performances come because they want to learn something. They want to reevaluate. People say, ‘Think about the fact that your [production] crew is all white’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, but they fucking know. They get it.’”

Wilkerson’s not interested in bending to the will of certain arts organizers, or in making work for the sake of funding. Instead, Wilkerson envisions the work he wants to make, then personally funds his performances. “I don’t want to do this thing where I only go to places that have money, and I only make their work,” he explains, “because then I’m building a repertoire of work I don’t even like.”

Even though Wilkerson had several sold-out shows in 2016, and about a half dozen other performances commissioned or accomplished though TNMOT AZTRO, his performance art and dance installation company, he still can’t attain a stable position in the system. After selling out three Projector Series shows at Real Art Ways in 2016, “I’m still broke and I was not getting funding,” he says. “So I was either tricking or working at a restaurant in order to make money for putting on shows and paying artists.”

“He’s doing the hustle a la 1974,” says Goffe.

“Why is it that I have to live in the community, work my ass off, and [they] hire people from Los Angeles to perform here?” Wilkerson asks. “Just give me the space, give me the crew, give me the money, and stand the fuck back.” This is partly why he doesn’t perform in classic prosceniums or black box theaters. Recently, he’s been performing in galleries and museums, fully embracing the challenge. “I like working in those confines because they have mad rules. So many things you can and cannot do. I love that we’re a company from the North End performing around thousand-year-old paintings.”

In EQUATORS, Wilkerson responds to climate change using an eroticized queer aesthetic. Photo by Brittany Solem

EQUATORS, which was staged at Housatonic Community College, is the most recent piece produced by the TNMOT AZTRO team and explores the intersection of environmental justice, racial justice, and “how racial divides are manifested in homes, neighborhoods, and geography due to impacts of zoning, segregation, and gentrification.” Clearly, Wilkerson’s intellectual and creative preoccupations are varied, vast in scope, and a bit daunting.

Wilkerson is particularly taken with a specific element of the sculpture David Borawski installed for him to dance through during EQUATORS: the metal chain he uses to pull himself up. “Right now, I definitely still feel like I’m on that chain. I still feel like I have to wake up every morning on that chain. I have to take myself to sleep at night holding the chain. Having something hold you up is such a gratifying experience, but also scary.”

Though there’s no doubt Wilkerson is a rogue, hustling to fund his own shows while actively raging against the institutions that still aren’t quite sure what to do with him, he does have a lot of staunch supporters. His newest group of dancers at TNMOT AZTRO are enthusiastic, skillful, and ready to support their fearless creative director. He is nearly in tears when he talks about his new team. “I’m such a baby. I’m so emotional. I cry,” confesses Wilkerson. “I’m a crier.”

Additionally, there are some organizations and individuals outside the world of dance and performance art that have the cultural clout needed to support Wilkerson’s mission. This past summer, he became the youngest person to receive the Spirit of Juneteenth Award from the Amistad Center for Art & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum, which celebrates community and cultural leaders. And Kristina Newman-Scott, Connecticut’s director of culture, values his transgressive approach to public discourse and performance. “He’s definitely one of our change agents,” says Newman-Scott. “He’s not afraid to ask questions, or tell you what he’s thinking”—she laughs—“which is appreciated. For him, being young, African American, male, queer, and coming from the world of performing arts, it’s never going to be easy.

“Wouldn’t it be great,” she adds, “for Arien to be the next Alvin Ailey?”

Certainly, Wilkerson could easily head back to the tattooed boys in Tel Aviv, or dance with his friends in different companies across New York City. But that’s not his definition of success. “I’m very invested in bringing high art and fine art back to the ’hood, and back to where I grew up,” he says. His biggest preoccupation is with “build[ing] a language where young queer people and young black people can talk about art. [The North End] is rough and I can’t fight that,” he continues. “I can’t be the guy who’s like, ‘stop the violence, stop the madness,’ but my art can.”

Despite his lack of reliable funding, Wilkerson wants to stay in Hartford. He wants to show the North End his truth, instead of leaving it behind. “I don’t want to do that to Hartford,” he laments. “I don’t want to threaten my city. I feel like I already threaten people enough.”

This piece originally appeared in the October/November 2017 issue. If you’d like to read more articles from that issue, click here.

Subscribers can also see an exclusive gallery of outtakes from our amazing photo shoot with Arien Wilkerson.

Arien Wilkerson – Dancer, Artistic Director – TNMOT AZTRO
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Top image: EQUATORS at the Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Photo by Brittany Solem

The post AZTRO Boy appeared first on Take Magazine.

A stone’s throw from the trendy bars and restaurants of Providence’s west side, on an unassuming block dominated by body shops, parking lots, and mill condos, sits a retail showroom. Barbed wire surrounds the building—a relic from previous owners—but eagle-eyed shoppers will spot the House of Cach logo on the building’s tufted front door. Beneath it, a description: “A Concept-Driven Jewelry/Accessory Retail Studio.”
Inside, buddhas, butterflies, and bullet casings cohabitate with preserved flowers, starfish, and cicadas.

The accessories company creates wild designs—which they describe as “wearable art”—for daring customers. Bold photos line the walls; a studded jockstrap/fur vest combo hangs only a few feet away from delicate pearl wedding headbands and large editorial pieces from a collection inspired by beetles and other bugs.

Company cofounder Alexa Cach (pronounced “cash”) was born and educated in Switzerland, but has called Providence home since 2002. Though she has always been compelled to create, she began her career in business, launching several production companies that showcased the work of other creative people: GWAND, a fashion week in Switzerland that lured the likes of Vivienne Westwood and Raf Simons; and later Pet Fashion Week, a New York trade show and runway event targeting high-end pet owners. (It sounds strange now, but this was peak Paris Hilton era.)

House of Cach founders photo by Ian Barnard

“It finally got to a point that my desire to build things outweighed the fear,” Cach says about her current venture, which she and cofounder Molly Northern launched seven years ago. Both knew immediately that they wanted House of Cach to exist outside the fast-paced fashion world. “As a small company, we can’t pump out several brand-new collections each year,” she admits. “By doing what we do, we’re not creating throwaway pieces that lose value as soon as next season comes along.”

On Alena: Silver spike flower crown, $1,300; white rose chestplate, $1,500; on Dylan: Gold flower choker (worn as headpiece), $675; gold flowing flower headpiece (worn as neckpiece), $1,275. Photo by Ian Barnard

House of Cach is conceptual, not trend driven. Cach thinks of each line as a large art installation, one that inspires pieces that incorporate the wearer into the project’s larger whole. #projectbug, for instance, was a multi-artist effort with pieces made from preserved insects. Large masks and headpieces were designed and showcased in elaborate photo shoots, and, eventually, smaller brooches and necklaces were made from real cicadas and beetles. It remains their most popular line.

But bugs? “I’m interested in the duality of emotion that insects provide,” she explains. “A single bug seems delicate and fragile, until it lands on you.”

Rondelle hair band, $79; crystal drop earrings, $110; crystal shard neckpiece, $275. Photo by Ian Barnard

Cach and Northern base a lot of designs on vintage metal components, many of which they’ve collected together over the years. “I can usually find just about anything,” says Northern, who designs individual pieces and sources all raw materials for the company. She’s secretive about her sourcing, but says that the company currently houses a large inventory of materials that are employed for custom pieces.

HoC has begun courting the bridal market, a seemingly incongruous creative jump. But brides had already been seeking out their designs, and the company enjoys the challenge of custom work, particularly for adventurous clients. (They once made a pair of bullet cartridge earrings for a three-year-old flower girl.)

To that end, the company launched a ready-to-wear bridal line in July, with headpieces and neck-pieces that incorporate freshwater pearls, real starfish, and orchids preserved in full bloom. Each element is part of a small capsule collection, one that can be modified and customized to fit the desires of each bride. Select New England stylists will carry each capsule—from tiaras and combs to necklaces and earrings—offering an unusual opportunity to mix and match.

Lucite earrings, $98; crystal shard, $275. Photo by Ian Barnard

As the bridal line expands, the artsier projects will also continue. “To offset the sweetness of the bridal line,” Cach says, “I want to do a body of work dealing with animal bones.”

A winking disclaimer on the company’s website perhaps best explains their philosophy: “Wearing House of Cach expresses an inner rebel and is not for everyone.”

Need more cach? Here’s a subscriber-only gallery of outtakes from our House of Cach fashion shoot.

House of Cach–custom jewelry
Providence, Rhode Island
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Top image: Large cicada necklace (worn as headpiece), $178; crystal drop earrings, $110; black hematite and onyx cuff, $98. Photo by Ian Barnard.

The post Cach Out appeared first on Take Magazine.