In some cases, Erik Baier has become good friends with the people living in the communes; they share stories and food, they become invested in and supportive of his project. In other cases, they avoid him, making a wide path around him and his “picture making.”

“It’s their loss really, I’m a fairly interesting and funny guy,” says Baier, the photographer behind the lens of the COMMUNE series recently featured at the BigTown Gallery in Rochester, Vermont.

The photos, which to date have been captured in Vermont, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, and as far west as Texas, depict the dwellings present in these exclusive communities. Some of the homes featured are made of wood, woven sticks, animal hides, adobe, tarps, paper crete, tires with rammed earth, cloth tents, vans and gutted school buses—the mediums vary widely.

From Erik Baier’s COMMUNE series. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Yet while the materials used to create these homes might differ from what is typical, Baier points out the many similarities between commune residents and the general population. “They are more or less like everyone else. Most prefer the comfort of their community and neighbors, but the outside world, not so much,” Baier says. “I suppose that’s one of the draws they have to live together.”

Due to this hesitance towards outsiders, it sometimes takes Baier months to open the doors to these communities. While some have internet presences, many more were referred by commune dwellers who had lived somewhere else previously. Luckily, Baier is very good at opening doors, and also at old-fashioned persuasive letter writing.

From Erik Baier’s COMMUNE series. Photo courtesy of the artist.

It makes sense that Baier would be drawn to capturing uncommon homes—he and his wife live in a 200-plus-year-old former school house in Rochester. “We both liked the idea of living in an unconventional structure,” says Baier. “Living in two school buildings that are mysteriously fastened together, plus a new painting studio/darkroom/office structure I added a few years ago, has made this unique, if not odd, building very purposeful.”

Baier, who was quite popular on the exhibition scene during the 1980s, started taking pictures at age ten and entered the school of The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston at 19. After having been featured at galleries throughout the country and in a few publications, Baier dropped out of the scene and continued to mainly make work for himself, until recently. Now he’s considering making his COMMUNE series into a book.

While seeking to peek into the private lives of these commune members remains a goal for Baier, who is by no means done with the COMMUNE series, he also enjoys his privacy at home in Rochester. “I love knowing most of the townspeople by their first names. I love the quiet and being able to have a day with no human interaction, then the next day being fast forwarded in a car driving somewhere to meet strangers, who then let me make pictures of how and where they live.”

Erik Baier–Photographer
Rochester, Vermont
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Top image, from Erik Baier’s COMMUNE series. All photos courtesy of Erik Baier.

The post An Un-Commune Life appeared first on Take Magazine.

Vermont collage artist Marcus Ratliff spent 40 years in an office on Madison Avenue plying his trade as a graphic designer, but inside his heart he had plans to return to an art form he no longer had time to pursue. His work in New York City saw him creating catalogs, posters, books, and other material for clients like Leo Castelli, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and others, but what he really want to do was make art for himself.

“I just got too damn busy and put it aside,” Ratliff says. “I just had to spend time in a different way.”

Looking back, he doesn’t see those four decades as an obstruction to creativity, but rather time spent gathering his tools and perfecting his methods. The collage work Ratliff creates now is done with the same methodology and materials he used all those years as a graphic designer, and much of his source material was amassed on Madison Avenue. Some of his current works use portions of his design work from that era, and his working size, 9″ x 12″, is a continuation of his graphic design standard.

Many of these works are on display in his new show, The Ladies Room, at the Big Town Gallery in Rochester, Vermont. They reveal the vast swirl of his expertise, not just at wielding an Xacto knife and applying glue, but pulling from the deepest recesses of his accrued knowledge and interests regarding art history to create unexpected connections to, as Ratliff puts it, “myths and ancient ideas of all kinds that creep into forms of art.”

Icarus Flirting

“I’m certainly influenced by Surrealism, and the things that don’t belong to each other originally, but when put together something happens,” he says. “There’s some spark of some sort that comes from putting things together that were never meant to be, and I like that.”

If graphic design is the practice of bringing different pieces together to create a cohesive presentation, Ratliff’s collage work is about taking those same parts and shuffling them into a new, sometimes disruptive, meaning. His piece Back to the Future features Little Red Riding Hood pulling a curtain to reveal her future encounter with the wolf. For Icarus Flirting, Ratliff mixes Greek mythology with 1920s lingerie to fashion something both absurd and tragic, displaying Ratliff’s dark humor. “It’s a little bit amusing that he has no idea that when he flies out to the sun he’s never going to survive it, and they don’t know it either,” muses Ratliff.

Pierette 2013

Ratliff moved to Vermont part-time 15 years ago, following his late wife’s diagnosis of ALS. He continued commuting back and forth to the city until after his wife’s passing in 2004, when he retired to devote his life to full-time art making. He now lives in Norwich, Vermont, where he creates collages in his home studio.

Marcus Ratliff–collage artist
Norwich, Vermont
Website

Top image She’s Leaving Home, image courtesy of Marcus Ratliff

The post Cut and Paste appeared first on Take Magazine.