Imagine a Muppets movie written by Kevin Smith, and you’ll probably get a decent idea of what’s going on at Elmwood Productions, a puppet-focused film production studio in central Connecticut. Jon Bristol founded the company (named after his hometown) in 2002, around five years after he started building his own puppets.

Elmwood’s work embraces humor in the absurd and the uncomfortable, aided by the additional reality-bending possibilities (what Bristol calls “the Looney Tunes element”) afforded narratives focused on puppets. The company’s original film follows one man waking from a nightmare to find his id manifest as a puppet, and its new series The Risley Brothers takes notes from Clerks. Many of the crew members used to work in retail, and strange customer-related anecdotes have found their way into the material.

Bristol works out of an old converted barn in West Hartford, and tries to distance his puppet aesthetic from Jim Henson’s. He bases some characters—like one of the Risley brothers—on himself, but often finds inspiration elsewhere. “I’m always carrying a sketchbook with me. If I’m in public somewhere and I see an odd-looking person, I’m gonna doodle them really quick and hopefully maybe turn them into a puppet.”

Jon Bristol–founder, Elmwood Productions
West Hartford, Connecticut
Website

top image: Jon Bristol and friends at Elmwood Productions. Photo by Paul Specht

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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

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong Brain
Dover, New Hampshire
Website

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

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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.

Photo courtesy of Beyond Walls and Christopher Gaines of The Littlest Astronaut

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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 following is from a novel by Sonya Larson called The Last Date, about a woman returning from the brink of death, but unhappily so. The novel is a work in progress.

When I was dying, Shui was nicer to me. He used to pull my undies from the dryer—three days’ forgotten and hardened to crinkled cocoons—then dump them on our bed in a rocky heap for me to sift through. My lacy briefs! My thongs! You’d never guess that at one point these delicates had made Shui’s eyes roll back in his head. “You bought me this!” I’d say, waving a satin leopard print. “Now you find it as thrilling as a potato.” I had humor, yes, but this could work against me—my husband never comprehended the suffering I had inside. Instead he laughed along, dumbly, like someone in a movie who’s about to get punched.

But now: here we were. I was dying and finally he saw. Now he gathered my undies and washed them by hand, afraid that the dryer would shred them: these things that would be the final relics of me. Plastic tub in the kitchen sink—the one with the worn-green rim. Bubbles and steam. Squeeze of soap. In went both his hands. From my stuck-place on the couch, I couldn’t see, but I could hear. Quiet sloshing. Wringing each one out in sudden sloshes and pauses. Easing them over the shower rod, where they’d drip drip drip to the floor until finally that ceased too.

A dream it was. Like falling in love again. But better, because in a way I was both falling for my husband and someone else. Someone kinder, more thoughtful—the person I’d always suspected that he could be. When my undies were dry, Shui folded each one neatly in half, like a taco. He’d carry a stack to the coffee table that was now my nightstand, in the living room that was now my bedroom. All the blinking machines and snaking tubes and charts to track my stats: in this moment these things seemed to disappear, sucked into the walls. I pulled my sweatshirt sleeve over my hand and wiped at my own tears—I didn’t know he had it in him. Too bad, that at the end of my life, I would finally understand just what a husband I had had.

At night, when I tried to sleep, trains from North Dakota blew forlornly on their horns, newly rich from fracking country, echoing through the snow and telling of the future.

Okay. So I wasn’t going to live a long and happy life. But perhaps—despite all odds—I would live a short, happy one. Or at least very happy at the very, very end.

In the mornings Shui hustled. He took care. He’d stand at the door and collect all those muffins and flowers, offered helplessly by randoms with their frowning, pained expressions. We knew nobody in our building, just Dan, because generally we felt that they were a different sort than us: “young professionals,” as the landlord called them, who liked bicycles and groceries delivered to them and watching eight straight hours of television. Except not even on a television—on a sad little laptop, which they stared at all day anyway. We made eye contact with the Young Professionals only in the basement, negotiating washing machines. I must confess that it was me who removed their sopping loads when they didn’t quickly fetch them—I’d heap them on the dryer and run upstairs, coward that I am.

And yet, here they came; somehow they had learned of my woe. Somehow all my crimes—laundry and otherwise—had been forgiven. They brought us Groupons for Indian takeout. Lavender bath salts, pillows highly rated on Amazon, jade figurines of horses and Buddhas for luck and health and whatnot. We lined them up on the coffee table and blinked at them, like thieves stunned by our useless load. I picked up a Buddha, thumbed its cold and laughing belly. So this is what the YPs thought of us—well, let them think it. Luckily, someone (my aunt? the neighbor?) had also brought some cigarettes, beautifully stacked in a long white box. I seized upon them, tore at the plastic. Then I blew a cool stream of smoke in the air above our couch. Shui cringed—he didn’t like this. Of this he was not a fan. But he didn’t stop me—how could he stop me? I could be dead in a matter of weeks.

I didn’t want it to end. But by “it” I mean this part—this very-very-end part of my life. The rest of it: whatever. Obviously I’d had enough.

I could tell Shui was getting lonely. He both itched to get away from me and was scared to leave me alone.

He invited Dan over. I didn’t like Dan. Dan had a teaspoon of bro in him, and when he got uncomfortable it was more like a tablespoon. “Yo yo yo,” came Dan’s rumbling voice in the hallway. “Brought these from my mom. Can’t stay long, sorry.” He was also a Young Professional and half our age, still living with his mother on the fourth floor. In the doorway, Shui collected a large, cloudy Tupperware, and around his body I could see the purple flashes of Dan’s Vikings jersey, which he seemed to put on desperately every day when he got home from work.

“You don’t look so bad,” Dan said at me, neck stretched to see around my husband. “Your hair and stuff. You look hot!” He laughed, awkwardly. He had as much grace as a refrigerator, but I could hear the kindness in him.

I didn’t know what to do. “Hear that, Shui?” I finally said. “I look hot.”

“Did I say that you didn’t?” said my husband.

“I mean it—she’s looking great. She really actually does.” And that’s when Shui nudged him into the hallway.

They stood outside the doorway, discussing things. Clearly Dan was not coming in. I couldn’t tell if he dared not venture further or if Shui wouldn’t let him. Either way, they both seemed to understand that this place—our home—was something toxic, secret, not to be witnessed by others. I heard them murmuring and talking of football, with long and nodding pauses. Dan had a brother who had just been redeployed. “It’s weird. He was just, like, here,” said Dan. He contemplated silently, then laughed again. “But hey. I get to drive his car?”

Sonya Larson
Boston, Massachusetts
Website

Illustration by Eva Redamonti

The post Outtake: The Last Date appeared first on Take Magazine.

On December 1, Cambridge-based gallery A R E A opened a second home in the SoWa neighborhood of Boston. Below, A R E A’s creative producer Nick Medvescek and founder and director David Guerra; artist Frank Floyd; and Amanda Accardi, owner of Around the Corner Framing, toasted the achievement.

A R E A’s creative producer Nick Medvescek; its founder and director, David Guerra; artist Frank Floyd; and Amanda Accardi, owner of Around the Corner Framing, at the opening of A R E A’s new SoWa location. Photo by Melissa Ostrow

A R E A

Boston, Massachusetts

Website

Photos by Melissa Ostrow

The post Taken: A R E A Gallery Opening appeared first on Take Magazine.

Ask locals about Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and you could hear anything. Old-timers are most likely to complain, either about that one mayor who went to jail or the PawSox. (The owners of Boston’s AAA baseball team have been threatening to skip town for years.) But you’ll also hear praise. Industrious shoppers will tell you about the latest deals they got amid the stationery aisles at Paperworks, or the two stories of material up for grabs at Lorraine Fabrics.

Foodies will recommend the Pawtucket Wintertime Farmers Market, set up each Saturday morning in Hope Artiste Village—a giant mall full of specialty stores . . . sort of. (It’s also a wedding venue, a bowling alley, and lots of other things.)

“I’m here largely because of the building,” says Kent Stetson, a designer of brightly printed handbags and leather goods. Hope Artiste Village has been his showroom and production facility for nearly four years, and it’s representative of the city’s mill studio culture. “If I’m here working at four in the morning, someone else will also be in the building working. There’s a 24-hour entrepreneurial spirit.”

Once home to a thriving textile industry, Pawtucket’s abandoned mills, like those in many other cities across New England, became prime real estate for artists in need of studios. The mills also attracted brewmasters who needed storage space. The Bucket, once a disparaging nickname for Pawtucket, now has a namesake in Bucket Brewery, a popular craft brewery—one of several in the city.

Another Pawtucket perk: low rents and large immigrant populations make it a great destination for culinary adventures on a budget. Within city limits, you can find everything from Venezuelan arepas to Szechuan dan dan noodles. The city’s Cape Verdean population is the country’s second largest, with one in eight residents claiming ancestry from Cape Verde’s ten tropical islands. Try unique culinary gems like cachupa, a slow-cooked, rustic meat stew that’s available for breakfast at Monte Cara. (It’s served with a side of linguica.) On the other side of town, 10 Rocks serves grilled octopus with plantains, plus empanada-like fried pastels (pronounced POSH-tels) with tuna or native cod.

Spend Friday nights in Pawtucket at the Ratskeller in the German American Cultural Society. Located on a side street in the middle of nowhere, the club’s basement beer hall opens to the public once a week for pretzels, schnitzel, and cucumber salad. The food is cheap, the foosball table free, and the beer freely—well, cheaply—flowing. If you’re there on the right night, you may even catch an elderly gentleman playing the accordion.

Illustration by Peter O. Zierlein

The post Take Place: Partial to Pawtucket appeared first on Take Magazine.