The 2011 Great ARTdoors Festival

Previously held in the summer, this Festival marked our move to the autumn side of the calendar. October 15th was a good choice with festival-goers enjoying the cooler weather and autumn leaves. Honorary Chairs, Hambidge Fellow Victoria Rowell and Radcliffe Bailey, both gave book signings on the Weave Shed porch. The hayride studio tour visited the studios of artists-in-residence, featuring artist talks by Lilian Garcia-Roig, Darlene Kaczmarczyk and Nathan Kelly. Installations and performances were presented by Peter Bahouth, Sadie Hawkins, Patricia Henritze & Nicole Livieratos, Hailey Lowe, Maja Spasova, Stan Woodard, and the Sixfold Collective. Julia Hill & Crew delighted us with life-sized puppets and Corrina Sephora Mensoff gave an entertaining and educational metalworking demonstration.

We tapped our toes to Live Blues, Old-time & Bluegrass Music with Grammy award-winning Art Rosenbaum and Friends, John Oliver & Carmel Ridge, and The Tony Bryant Blues Band. Farm-to-Table Food with Local Wines & Brews was provided by Lake Rabun Hotel & Restaurant, Andy’s Trout Farm, The Good Food Truck, and Tiger Mountain Vineyards. U-do-Raku (where you glaze your own pottery and have it fired to take home) was a favorite, as always, and we had pumpkin painting and a haunted walk for the kids.

Artists

Peter Bahouth
Lilian Garcia-Roig
Sadie Hawkins
Patricia Henritze
Julia Hill
Darlene Kaczmarczyk
Nathan Kelly
Nicole Livieratos
Hailey Lowe
Corrina Sephora Mensoff
Allen Peterson
Maja Spasova
James Taylor
Stan Woodard
Sixfold Collective

Project & Artist Descriptions

Mary’s Mockingbird by Peter Bahouth
Mary’s Mockingbird is a site specific stereoscopic photography project by Peter Bahouth with an assist from Jamie Badoud and Mary Hambidge. Consisting of 6 stereoscopic viewers on stands, each viewer contains a photograph of Mary Hambidge’s handmade mockingbird cage taken at the location of each viewer. This work responds to Mary Hambidge’s early days as a professional whistler performing with her pet mockingbird Jimmy in New York City in the 20s.

The viewers are located at: 
• The wire arch near the Spring House 
• The Lodge ruins on the Haunted trail walk to the Antinori Pottery Studio 
• Judy’s Bench in front of Garden Studio 
• The Porch of Mary Hambidge’s log house 
• In front of Mary Hambidge’s log house

Peter Bahouth is one of the few contemporary artists working with stereoscopic images, as technique as old as photography itself.  

Studio Visit with Lilian Garcia-Roig
Lilian Garcia-Roig was born in Havana, Cuba and lives in Tallahassee where she is a professor of Art at FSU, While at the Center she plans on capturing some of the fall colors into her large-scale on-site paintings of dense landscape that overwhelm the views perceptual senses through their cumulative layering of image and paint. The final works are as much about the materiality of the paint and the physicality of the painting process as they are about mixing and mashing the illusionist possibilities of painting with its real abstract nature.

Among her awards are a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, a Mid-America Arts Alliance/NEA Fellowship Award in Painting, and a fellowship residencies to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell Colony and Vermont Studio Center.

Aerial Performance by Sadie Hawkins
Sadie Hawkins combines elements of aerial artistry and modern dance during performance on a custom, tower-like apparatus. Part jungle gym and part cage, the tower grounds aerial dance and presents a new approach to interaction with a familiar structure from childhood.

Drawing inspiration from pop culture and a childhood full of music, theater, and musical theater, Sadie Hawkins (Sadie Upchurch) is a burlesque performer, fire dancer and aerialist based in Atlanta.

Studio Visit with Nathan Kelly
Nathan Kelly is a film and concert composer from Los Angeles. He studied orchestration at Texas and Juilliard and is currently working on a three-movement Harp Concerto and four-movement Symphony No. 2 for orchestra premieres in 2012. Visit Mr. Kelly in Garden Studio to hear him describe his creative process and share some of his work.

PROXIMITY: 4th installment working title LOOP by Patricia Henritze and Nicole Livieratos
Patricia and Nicole will be developing material for LOOP, which explores ideas surrounding foreclosure and shelters. LOOP is part of the ongoing series of collaborations between Patricia and Nicole entitled, PROXIMITY. This collaboration focuses on eliciting memory, developing teaspoons of material that fold into one another, creating surprises with high and low tech materials, using text and movement, and relationally charged performances.

Patricia Henritze is a writer, teacher and theater artist interested in new works and interdisciplinary collaborations. Nicole Livieratos is a choreographer, movement artist, and founder/director of Gardenhouse.

Puppet Performance by Julia Hill and Crew
Julia and her crew will be presenting a variety of over-sized animal puppets that are part of their mysterious menagerie. Opportunities will arise throughout the day to play catch with Picasso the Abstract Gorilla, watch the dread vultures tumble and display their musical talent, loop a ring onto the giant flamingo, and much more.

Julia Hill is an Atlanta-based artist and puppeteer with projects ranging from metal and ceramic sculpture to performance, set design and installation.

Untitled by Darlene Kaczmarczyk
In the 1950’s food manufacturers saturated print and media advertising in search of new markets for products developed for the military during World War II. Spam, Twinkies, and other highly processed foods have become icons of the unhealthy eating habits of that generation, especially when contrasted with today’s organic, local, and slow food movements. This yet-to-be-titled project considers how advertising and industry affect our food choices by creating a surreal and humorous juxtaposition of contemporary and vintage food imagery.

Darlene Kaczmarczyk is an artist based in Grand Rapids, MI who uses lens-based imagery to wryly comment on advertising.

Urban Boundaries by Hailey Lowe
Boundaries are a way of organizing the world. They are the unseen forces that help guide us as to what is right and what is wrong. The double yellow lines evoke a sense of rules and limitations where there usually is none.

Here the lines represent a growing loss between the boundaries of urbanism and nature. By referencing a place where people are not typically confronted with boundaries, I am opening up the possibilities to think about the lines we construct within our lives as well as the boundaries or walls that people create for us.

Machines of Luring Grace by Hailey Lowe
Exploring the subversive use of technology in today’s culture, Machines of Luring Grace invites nature to interact with the modern technology that has attracted them to the space.

As technology grows in our modern world we are constantly altering nature. While dominant culture continues to eradicate the natural with the synthetic, the installation has turned the tables. In this abstracted work, I question where we are headed in a world that breathes technology. Here the predator and prey game is altered to place nature as the dominant player – allowing nature to erase technology.
*An extension of an earlier installation titled Machines of Loving Grace.

Hailey Lowe was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She moved out west to attend school at the University of Colorado where she received her BFA in creative advertising with a focus in art history and studio arts as well as a Technology, Arts and Media Studies certificate. After moving back home, Lowe graduated top of her class in June 2011 as the Excelsus Laureate with her MFA in Sculpture from Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta. With a focus on installation, performance and video documentation art, her influences come from nature, history and our human relations with the environment.

Hive Consciousness by Allen Peterson
Peterson will present a piece of art for future collaboration with the Hambidge beehives. A cast beeswax portrait bust of a young child will be presented rising out of a wooden beehive, thus beginning to suggest the complex hive consciousness that emerges when tens of thousands of bees work together within the hive. After the presentation at the Hambidge event, the sculpture will be placed inside one of the hives on the Hambidge grounds so that the honeybees on site may have the opportunity to alter the composition. When the head is removed from the hive in the spring, the bees may well have rearranged the wax in ways that we can't predict, adding to and subtracting from the sculpture as they see fit, fully integrating the sculpted face and head with the beehive itself.

Allen Peterson is an artist who is interested in honeybees, humans and the industrious co-evolution of our two species.

The Mask by Maja Spasova
The project The Mask deals with the troublesome issues of vigilance, control, lost of privacy. The project raises questions about personality, persona, identity, multiple existences, parallel lives, multi-layering in the psyche. The audience is given a number of realistic half-face masks representing the face of the artist. The audience has a total freedom to act and speak in improvised manner in front of the camera.

With a mask on the face, the reserved public persona can be put on one side; the mask releases the inhibitions restraining public behavior. The participants will enter, however briefly, a world apart from the mundane reality of life. Will they adopt an existing stereotype character of an artist/bohemian or will they create totally new characters and new worlds? What happens during the state of anonymity and unrecognizability and without the social and moral bands of the surrounding group/society?

The Mask will act as an artistic, social and psychological research and will be realized in several locations in Europe and USA.

My Darling by Maja Spasova
With the sound installation My Darling I aim to create a magic contemplative landscape in the sign of love. My inspiration: the songs of the crickets, the city-birds’ choirs, Odysseus’ journey, Orpheus and Eurydice, the loneliness of modern man. Voices calling on their beloved ones, “my darling”, “my love”, “I miss you”, create a space defined by both sonic parameters and longing.

The installation is based on numerous sound spots and each visitor experiences the composition in a unique way depending on the rout chosen and the specific moment. I’m interested in the hidden and unnoticed places of the given environment, in the dynamic between used and unused rooms and in the possibility of revealing their new dimensions.

The recordings for My Darling were made at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, US 2010 and the sound remastered by Mark Russell, London 2011. Participants: Kathleen Markowitz, Mary-Sherman Willis, Luis Hilario Arévalo, George Ellenbogen, Myong Stebbins, Katherine Fahey, Carolyn Ogburn, Richard E. Cytowic, Jeanne Larsen, Susie Hara, Annita Sawyer, Lynn Pauley and others.

Floaters by Stan Woodard
When we see spots before our eyes, often it is really spots within our eyes that we see; floaters are small clumps of cells moving within the vitreous of our eyes. The Spring House interior serves as the ocular organ in this imagined macroverse; floaters are specks of light reflecting off a cluster of specular orbs.

Stan Woodard is an Atlanta-based artist whose primary focus is immersive installation

Lair by Sixfold Collective
Lair is a new project by Sixfold Collective that will be shown at Abernathy Arts Center from Nov. 18-Dec. 31, 2011. A small preview will be installed at the Hambidge Festival in October. Based on the concept and form of a net, it addresses vulnerability and strength, enclosure and openness, capture and release, and ephemeral accumulation.

Collaborating Artists are Terri Dilling, Amandine Drouet, Susan Ker-Seymer, Leisa Rich and Ann Rowles.

Forging Relationships by Corinna Mensoff
Option 1: Forging projects such as a leaf or hook will be created by visitors under the guidance of Corrina and her assistants, participants will take these items home.

Option 2: Parents will have the opportunity to learn side by side with their small ones! Ages 5-18, with an adult. Participants can create their own meaningful text on a copper unbreakable heart to take home.

Option 3: Participants can make your own hand forged copper bracelets to take home.

Price Structure: For a low price you can pick the object you want to work on: Unbreakable Hearts $10-$30, Leaves $20, Copper Bracelets $20

Corrina began her life-long interest in metalworking at the age of five in her father’s workshop. Raised on an organic farm in rural New Hampshire by artist parents, Corrina spent her formative years communing with nature and cultivating the passion that would become her art. She went on to receive her BFA in Sculpture and Metalsmithing at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and after graduating in 1995, moved to Atlanta, GA, where she created a self-guided journeyman’s apprenticeship. After two years of working with others she established Phoenix Metalworks, specializing in sculpture, furniture, and architectural works. In 2005 Corrina received her MFA in Sculpture at Georgia State University. She has taught on the college level and presented at national and international blacksmithing conferences and workshops.

Corrina combines the art and craft of blacksmithing and metalworking with life, and her contemporary sculpture, installation and mixed media works. Hambidge continues to be a place to cultivate and inspire the depths of her work.

Hosts

Pork-Pie Hat Hosts
Alecia Adair-Foltz & Doug Foltz
ASD, Inc.
Margaret Baldwin & Paul Pendergrass
Lucinda & Bob Bunnen
Sherry & Jeff Cohen
Susan & Mike Conger
Lavona Currie
Dillard Tourist Association
Martha Eskew & Chet Tisdale
Judy & Ed Garland
Nena Griffith
Judy & Dave Higgins
Imagers
Melissa Bunnen Jernigan & James Jernigan
Ann & Tim Johnson
Alfred Kennedy & Bill Kenny
Susan & Max Ker-Seymer
Dorothy Yates Kirkley
Malissa Ladd & Bill Peace
Judy & Scott Lampert
Liz Lapidus
Elizabeth & David Martin
March & Ron Martin
Donna & Jeff Mintz
Susan Reed
Belinda & Ken Reusch
Rosemary & Bill Stiefel
Deborah Sudbury
Ruth West & Bob Wells
Joan Whitcomb
Barb & Thom Williams

Cloche Hat Hosts
Susan & Ron Antinori
Lyn & Rick Asbill
Lynn Cochran-Schroder & Bill Schroder
Catherine & Byron Cocke
Annette Cone-Skelton & J. Robert Hipps
Diane Durgin
Yolanda & Greg Head
Nancy & Gene Hooff
Marianne & Dick Lambert
Chris Lewis & John Johnson
Amy & Casey Jones
Janey Lowe
Jo & Jim McLean
Mysty & Bruce McLelland
Peggy & Eston Melton
Claire Sterk & Kirk Elifson

Bonnet Hosts
Brent Adams / Private Bank of Buckhead
Corinne & Jeff Adams
Judy & Dick Allison
Lisa & Joe Bankoff
Bonnie Beachamp-Cooke & George Cooke
Susan Bridges
Andrea & Ed Brownlee
Carolyn Carr Sr.
Carolyn Carr & Michael Gibson
Le & Beauchamp Carr
Angelyn & Neal Chandler
Jane Cofer & David Roper
Terri Dilling
Pat & Jim Durrett
Faye Fine
Charles Gandy
Bobbie & John Golden
Katherine & Richard Graham
Louise S. Gunn
Bill Hamilton
Judy & Spurgeon Hays
Juli Herren
Wanda S. Hopkins
The Journey's Project
Gordon Mansergh
Mason Murer Fine Art
Katherine Mitchell & Jack Lawing
Lynne Moody
Opal Moore
W. Chester Old & Steven E. Bennett
Margaret & Kincaid Patterson
Terri & Craig Pendergrast
Dawne Raulet
Suzanne Shaw & Daniel Biddy
Leanne & Chris Shaw
Judy Shreve
Leckie & Bill Stack
Anne Sterchi
Marilyn Stuart
Alison Womack-Jowers
Tom Woodham
Nan & Kendall Young

The 2011 Great ARTdoors Festival

Artists

Project & Artist Descriptions

Hosts

Sponsors