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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anna Von Mertens–Artist
Peterborough, New Hampshire
Website

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

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While Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne is probably best known as an artist for her cut paper illustrations, she has many identities, all of which are connected. As an exhibiting artist, full-time high school art teacher, and co-founder of The Glass Museum, she plays a major role in the Peterborough arts community. Though much like paper cutting, the added challenge in Goldthwaite-Gagne’s life is that the entire piece has to hold together as one connected structure in the end.

“Of course, there is a constant search for balance between all of these identities,” Goldthwaite-Gagne says. “It is a challenge to ever feel like I am excelling at all of these things simultaneously.” Yet as the recipient of the 2013 New Hampshire Civic Leader of the Year Award and a 2017 PBS Digital Innovator, it’s clear Goldthwaite-Gagne is making a positive impact in her community.

Becoming a parent has given Goldthwaite-Gagne a greater sense of urgency in teaching and community building in general. “I am constantly asking myself if I’m helping to cultivate a school culture that I would be happy having my child be part of,” says Goldthwaite-Gagne. “I really love living and teaching in the same community; I can’t imagine dividing my energy into different communities simultaneously.”

Outside the classroom, Goldthwaite-Gagne’s art was recently featured in the 2017 Whitney Houston Biennial: Greatest Love of All exhibit in New York City. She has also been working on a series of portraits of women she admires. Her goal for 2017 is to create at least 52 portraits, which she will debut at Aviary Gallery in Jamaica Plain in early 2018. “This started with a poster project that I created this past fall to raise money for Planned Parenthood,” says Goldthwaite-Gagne. She chose nine of her creative heroes: Alma Thomas, Nancy Spero, Yoko Ono, Eva Hesse, The Guerilla Girls, Margaret Kilgallen, Zadie Smith, Swoon, and Sarah Urist Green. Goldthwaite-Gagne sold 50 posters in one day, and raised $500 for Planned Parenthood.

Through The Glass Museum, a 501c3 non-profit organization that began in early 2008, Goldthwaite-Gagne and her co-founder and husband, Eric, produce Broke: The Affordable Arts Fair and The Thing in the Spring concert series. Their mission? To bring world-renowned music and high quality affordable art to the Peterborough community at large.

The duo did not set out to build an arts non-profit. Initially, things started out with modest music and arts events around Peterborough, but over the years the scale of these events has grown exponentially. “The guiding principle of Broke has always been that art is for everybody,” Goldthwaite-Gagne says. “We are committed to always offering free admission to the public, keeping the work on sale under $50, and maintaining affordable tabling fees for vendors.” These days, Broke frequently receives more applicants than they can accommodate, often times twice as many.

“To me, these projects are really about bringing the art and music that we love to Peterborough, which is a really singular and special place,” says Goldthwaite-Gagne.

Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne–artist/teacher/co-founder of the Glass Museum
Peterborough, New Hampshire
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The post The Job-Defying Mary Goldthwaite-Gagne appeared first on Take Magazine.

To the unsophisticated ear, drone music might be construed as little more than grating noise that lacks any semblance of melody or rhythm—the sort of senseless, monotonous racket they use to flush ruthless dictators from their mansions. But for accomplished electronic composer Dave Seidel, this ambient, dynamic, and experimental style—and its boundless possibilities—helped vivify his creative juices nearly 15 years ago, at a time when he began questioning his lifelong devotion to songwriting.

“I had sort of drifted away from music around 2003, but became rejuvenated in terms of composing when I figured out this is the kind of stuff I really wanted to do,” says Seidel, known to drone fans as Mysterybear. “I decided there were things I wanted to explore, in terms of drones and special tuning, and once I actually delved into it myself, I realized it’s a good focus for me. I’ve had a ton of ideas ever since.”

David Seidel performing in Rochester, NY, photo by Rob Nuuja

The sounds that the Le Monte Young-influenced Seidel produces are dynamic and textured. His music challenges the listener with a multilayered range of long sustained, minimalist tones that are delicately interspersed with glorious feedback and intriguing noise fragments. Needless to say, it isn’t for everyone.

“In some pieces, I use a technique called binaural beats and to get the true effect, you need headphones,” says Seidel, who is a software engineer when he’s not writing music. “It’s almost an acoustic allusion, in a way; you need headphones in order to hear it in the center of your head. I think of each piece as an instrument I assemble with everything that I have.”

Seidel, who first picked up a guitar at 12 and studied classical music at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, did stray from New England for about a decade, moving to Brooklyn where he survived as a session player. Seidel says that when he can find venues that book “the non-pop stuff that I do,” he plays his epic pieces live throughout New England and the Northeast. He also travels for various music festivals, including last year’s Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States conference in Minnesota.

“I would have been making music wherever I ended up, but I think that, because I ended up being a late bloomer in terms of the type of music I wanted to make, the fact that I was in this environment was completely inspirational,” Seidel says.

“I feel at home here,” he says of New Hampshire. “I live in a rural area near a town; I’m not really in town, so I have constant inspiration from the natural world around me. I can’t imagine ever not living in New England, because it is a big part of my identity.”

Want to hear what’s on Seidel’s Spotify list? Check out our Take a Listen channel.

David Seidel
Peterborough, New Hampshire
Website
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Soundcloud

Top image, David Seidel performing at Toadstool Books, Peterborough, New Hampshire, photo by Tom DePlonty

The post David Seidel Likes to Drone On appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our October 2015 print issue.

Craft is an ingrained value here, visible in everything from the historical society’s collection of eighteenth-century American furniture (well worth a look) to the Sharon Arts Center, which features dozens of local artists working across media and styles. Since 1907, leading artists have been coming to the exclusive, secluded MacDowell Colony on the outskirts of town. More recently, Michael Chabon and Jeffrey Eugenides wrote parts of their Pulitzer Prize-winning novels there.

Peterborough is an essential destination for literature and music, with plenty of readings and concerts throughout the year.The Toadstool Bookshop provides the kind of immersive browsing experience of books and records that online shopping will never rival. Start a conversation with manager Eric Gagne, who runs the music department; organizes the Thing in the Spring music festival; and tours with his own band, Footings. Gagne has encyclopedic knowledge and says he is “sincerely interested in knowing customers’ tastes and connecting them to artists that they may not know about, but will absolutely love.”

For live music, Harlow’s Pub is a local mainstay with universal appeal. The patio is ideal for seasonal beers during the day, while night brings a steady stream of musicians for weekly bluegrass jams and open mikes. Harlow’s is easily one of the best stages between Boston and Burlington, Vermont, and hosts an impressive array of regional and national acts on weekends, including a recent appearance by members of the band Morphine and an ever-growing roster of innovative groups drawing from genres like psych pop, indie rock, Americana and folk, jam, funk, jazz, and even world music.

Like the town itself, Peterborough’s secondhand shops fit precisely between the everyday and the pretentious. The Melamine Cup (six miles toward Jaffrey on Route 202) specializes in midcentury modern furniture and home goods, with a particularly good selection of barware—perfect for dressing up vintage cocktails in period vessels.

In town, the group shop Bowerbird & Friends cultivates a modern farmhouse aesthetic with industrial touches. Several pieces of folk art, especially the “tramp art” made by itinerant travelers, collapse the distinction between high art and handmade function. “A younger generation is returning to New England heritage but bringing fresh eyes,” says store owner Katherine Forrest. “When they come in, they respond with inspiration and surprise—there is a sense of discovery, but also recognition and familiarity.

Illustration by Chris Piascik

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