So where do we go from here? We’ve performed a little emergency surgery on a few of the pieces and believe we’re stabilized to weather a 4-6 week installation. At the end of April the paintings will go up in gallery space at The Durham Art Guild. We’ll have an opening there and maybe an additional event or two including an auction to benefit Preservation R.E.D. before the project culminates in late Summer 2011.

While the paintings are installed on Driver Street, we wanted to make them readily available to all via this 1-page pdf fit with artist statement, driving directions, neighborhood map and contact information. Links are active in this pdf, FYI.

Get the 1-page pdf here.

And here’s a Flickr set on the project to whet your appetite:

Please visit and/or share the link to my New Neighbors Facebook page:

http://on.fb.me/Alsobrooks

We’ll be sharing images and information about upcoming events we have planned around the installation in the coming month or so. While you’re at it, SAVE THE DATE:

March 3, 5:30 -7:30
100 Block of S. Driver Street
Durham, NC

Along with the installation we’ll have food trucks and great friends to hang out and joy a sense of community.

The first two completed New Neighbors portraits have been included in a historic show at the Durham Arts Council. It’s the first time in its storied history that DAC has curated a show from within. Barclay McConnell has created a unique showing of differing emphasis, technique and mood. And she’s brought all of this together from Triangle artists. She might cringe, but Washington, D.C. could use more folks like her. For exhibit deets:

http://www.thirdfridaydurham.com/events/view/509
http://www.durhamarts.org/exhibits.html

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Here’s a quick synopsis from the press release associated with the show (which you can download below):

The Durham Arts Council (DAC) presents People You May Know, an exhibition of non-traditional, contemporary portraits that aims to celebrate the diversity and richness of our regional community. The exhibit will be on display in the DAC’s Allenton and Semans Galleries from OCTOBER 8, 2010 through JANUARY 9, 2011 and features work by nine area artists working in a variety of two-dimensional media. The exhibition also highlights two artistic projects by Durham community activists: the Community Portrait of Durham and the New Neighbors project. The public is invited to the artists’ reception on Third Friday, October 15, from 5 to 7 PM, which will include the official unveiling of the Community Portrait of Durham as well as a surprise portraiture-related art happening.

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So my commentary on this show is short and sweet. Simply put, I’m honored to be included with this group and by this organization. As I see community being built in Durham across all age groups, socio-economic status, race, interests, ambition, etc., it’s great to be a part of a show that makes this a point of emphasis. Reminds me of my last show with the folks at LabourLove. There’s something about this town that makes this the norm rather than the exception. Anyhow, the artists are acclaimed, the vibe is positive, the venue is prepped and everyone is hungry for the weekend. We have wine, thanks to Wine Authorities, so I will see you there!

Here’s the current list of press associated with the show (this will undoubtedly grow):
Press Release for the People You May Know exhibit (featuring New Neighbors work)
People You May Know exhibit column in The Durham News by curator, Barclay McConnell
People You May Know featured in The Duke Chronicle
People You May Know featured in The Durham Herald-Sun
People You May Know featured in The Durham News (again!)

LabourLove Gallery
August 20, 2010 to October 10, 2010
6:00 PM to 7:00 PM
Art Exhibition
Admission: Free, Open to public
Parking: Main, Visitor and Auxillary Parking Lots

In “Look Away Dixie Land” McArthur Freeman, Titus Brooks Heagins, & Dave Alsobrooks explore themes of racism in the south through painting, photography, and mix-media.

McArthur’s Artist Statement:

I create narrative paintings, drawings, and installations exploring race, double consciousness, and the construction of identity. The images are a synthesis of children’s book illustrations, fairy tales, and invented characters with historical narratives, images from popular culture, and social critique to create a wonderland like world that has gone disturbingly awry, but is seductively beautiful. Th…e images are surreal, yet they investigate many of the myths and absurd truths that exist in our real world experiences. Dark subject matter that is sweetened by cartoon-like figures, lyrical compositions, vivid color, and bulbous sensual forms, unify a host of iconic references in these painted environments. Painting becomes a way of exploring and confronting the images that we consume in order to create a dialogue between image, perception, and constructed reality. Through these open-ended narratives, I explore the displacement involved in the expectations of the utopian American dream and the reality of racism, mind colonization, confused notions of beauty, and hybridity.

McArthur earned an MFA from Cornell University and is currently a professor at NC State.

Titus’s Artist Statement:

The pivotal question is whether we owe a debt to those ancestors who endured so we could have life. They lived lives of pain, indignities, unfulfilled desires and dreams, while surrounded by fear and the various forms of physical and spiritual death. The debt we owe is not reparations, nor national apologies — those issues are for the larger society to ponder. Ours is a debt more personal, central to our persistence and continued survival as a people in a nation still hostile to our presence. I create images today to interrogate the past. Visual realities that are dense in detail and laden with conflicting meaning so overwhelming that they hold the potential to extract our own truths from a filter of the past. We remain prisoners of our past; we may not acknowledge this fact, but we remain held by our denial as well as our acceptance of the truths of enslavement. African Americans come into the world with vulnerable potential, but are quickly damaged. Daily indignities confront us as we negotiate our path in a cloaked and clouded. As both an institution and experience, slavery is rarely a conscious reality for most African Americans. Both inter and intra racial relations bear the foundations created in antebellum America. The sole purpose of this exhibition is to present a series of visual relationships that existed both internally and externally in the plantation economies of the American South. The truth of these images lies in your past, present, and future experiences.

Titus is a documentary photographer and teacher of photography at the university level. He earned his undergraduate degree from Duke University and MFA from the University of Michigan.

Dave’s Artist Statement:

Let me start by saying I’m not pretending to answer age-old questions about race relations with paintings of the Confederate flag. But you may have guessed as much. I’m simply recounting my experience of growing up in South Carolina. As with the strong graphic lines of the Confederate Flag, there were distinct lines in life. Geographic and cultural, acceptable and punishable. The Confederate Flag has been a point of contention in South Carolina for generations. The flag has traditionally been a prominent icon, seen on license plates, shirts, tattoos, bumper stickers and keychains among other items. The “Southern Cross” was even displayed atop the state’s capitol building from 1962 until 2000. Arguments were made to remove the flag and to uphold its public display in Columbia. I knew folks entrenched on either side of this discussion, so I was privy to both points of view. During this time the phrase, “Heritage, not hate,” became popular. It became the “politically correct” slogan accompanying the Confederate Flag. Paraphrased: the Confederate Flag doesn’t have any hateful associations — its public display is only a tribute to history, heritage and a way of life. Heritage, not hate? To whose heritage are we referring?

What if this powerful symbol were only about the sacrifices and tribulations of people fighting to maintain their way of life? Or what if the flag only encompassed simple family traditions being passed from generation to generation, with none of the mistakes made along the way? What if the flag were reclaimed and used as a defiant symbol of perseverance and cultural vibrancy? Or what if in the flag, we were only witness to its worst associations throughout history?

More questions, I admit.

Dave is the Durham Art Guild’s artist in residence at GB for 2010, the co-founder of The PARAGRAPH Project, and an organizing member of BULLWORKS

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Press clippings about the show:

The Herald-Sun featured a great piece about the show — download a pdf

The Duke Chronicle picked up the story, too — download a pdf

I received an email at 12:23 am this morning informing me that the New Neighbors project made it into the Pepsi Refresh Everything project.

What does that mean? Well, it’s only the first hurdle that needed to be cleared.

I’ve asked for a $5,000 grant to blow out the project rather proper-like. This will help promote the launch event that will coincide with Preservation North Carolina’s annual conference. It will also purchase the supplies needed to build frames and stretch canvases for the post-installation auction.

So what happens next?

The project has a page on the Pepsi Refresh Everything website. You can go there and vote for it once every single day until midnight on July 31st. Please do go and vote as manytimes as possible between now and July 31st! You can actually vote for up to 10 projects a day, and there are lotsa great ideas. That’s it — come August 1st Pepsi will award funding to up to ten of the $5K ideas (there are other money categories).

So once more, please visit the New Neighbors page on the Pepsi Refresh Everything site everyday in July and cast a vote!

Nd now… you can text your vote from your phone! Just text 100120 to 73774… daily! Thanks so much!

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That’s right — I need you to help in the completion of my New Neighbors project. Why should you help? I can tempt you with a few reasons:

+ ultimately this means you will be part of an art installation in east Durham, NC
+ once the installation is over, paintings will be auctioned to benefit Project RED & local arts orgs
+ a launch event is tentatively scheduled to coincide with Preservation NC’s annual conference
+ it’s fun and definitely easy (at least your part will be!)

So what is it I need you to do? Simply pose for a photograph of yourself doing something completely mundane, such as:

+ ironing a shirt
+ changing a light bulb
+ sautéing a side dish
+ peering out with binoculars
+ jumping on a bed
+ teaching a class

I’ll provide the props if you’ll visit me in my studio on a Third Friday at Golden Belt in Durham, NC. The next Third Friday is June 18 and our open studio times are scheduled from 6-9 pm. Come on by. If you want to schedule another time to come by, we can work that out, too.

Heck, you can even send me a photo you already have. I’ll take it! Just make sure you are clearly defined (against a light-colored wall, for example). So let’s say you wanted to illustrate sautéing dinner. All you really need is the pan and you can “sauté” balls of paper or socks or potato chips. That part doesn’t really matter. The photos will become line drawings so I can fudge the missing parts later. Shoot me a note if that doesn’t make sense, or if you want to come by my studio sometime.

Ms. Waxman reviewed my “Heritage, Not Hate?” series. I’m sharing the text below.

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Is there a more loaded American symbol than the confederate flag? I suppose the greenback gives it a run for its money, bad pun intended, but the sheer indispensability of money will always trump any concerns with its history or the current state of American, i.e. world, capitalism. Not so the former flag of the southern United States, whose usefulness today seems more or less limited to 1) an unapologetic nostalgia for the way things used to be, and 2) a criticism of the way things used to be. “The way things used to be” in this case refers to a history of slavery, segregation and racist violence directed toward African Americans. What artist Dave Alsobrooks has done in a series of four collage canvases based on the design of the flag is, oddly enough, to acknowledge both of these possibilities. One white and one black canvas each convey a nostalgic picture of, respectively, conservative white and black family values. On their own, these stand as strikingly uncritical visions of a divided south. Displayed alongside a second pair of pictures, however, the tone changes. Here is the awful history of it all, classic red and blue for Civil War era challenges, yellow for Civil Rights era ones. Taken apart, a limited, almost clichéd history of the south presents itself. But taken together, a complex version emerges.

—Lori Waxman

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You can see Amy White’s great review of the performance from the Indepenpendent Weekly here. And view a slide show of all the reviews here.

When we started on this project, we didn’t know the name of the album or even what all of the songs would be or sound like. But we dove in anyways. We had some general conversations about tone and feel — all those sorts of things. I was made privy to a bunch of covers from other bands that the client liked.

And I shared random examples of how I saw things evolving. I had these ideas of very graphic executions. Some geometry. Is it black and white? I wanted to push the limits of the legibility of the type. It needed to be strong and more like a little piece of art than a designed cover, so I was thinking of doing everything by hand. I could see it, for sure, but was it right for the music?

Well, the music started taking shape and continually evolved over the next few months. Scott Solter, visionary producer for The Mountain Goats and Okkervil River and others, was brought in. The partnership between The Struggs and Solter produced some really interesting sonics. There are layers. The songs have a strong sense of place. And there was tangible, weighty emotion, even beyond the extremely personal lyrics of frontman, Randy Bickford (he’s the client). Here’s a short quote re: Randy’s music:

“The opposite of histrionic, Bickford offers a subdued palette rich in the fineness of its distinctions”
–Pitchfork

A visual concept emerged of a heart (and the circulatory system). I was still seeing (forcing) a graphic execution, but one with a real sense of hand — close to folk art even, but with dark colors. We didn’t want this to end up cliché, though, so we moved beyond the heart and started looking at medical imagery of the circulatory system (in humans, FYI). These were really interesting once we started layering and distorting to give the images texture. In a way, mimicking the musical production process the band had recently undergone. We were operating with a tentative title of “Cursoring.”

My initial ideas were still way off. The strong graphic approach I was advocating was not the ticket after all. We continued collaborating.

In the end we arrived at 3 “markers” for the imagery that explained the main qualities of the songs and illustrated these concepts in the following ways:

EMOTION: the circulatory system and other physiological imagery. Think synapses and arteries and stuff
HISTORY: a very old tree. Trees are witness to everything around and often live longer than we do
PLACE: an old map of Virginia, specifically Danville, captures the origin of much of the inspiration for the album

We wanted this all to feel heady and deep and lush and old. And here’s what we came up with.

I have to say it was a different, and really refreshing, process for me. It was not the typical need-it-yesterday project. Randy was a great client — respectful of time as well as ideas. And he really helped push the project in the right direction without creating unnecessary work. We see this small step as the first for the album, knowing we want to expand the ideas into a larger, more engaging piece down the line. I’ll be looking forward to that.

Thanks for reading this far.

And besides, logos are fun. How can we make some concocted graphic symbolize a company’s entrepreneurial spirit while nodding to the owner’s dog’s tri-colored coat and the fact his business was first conceptualized by sketching directly on a surfboard 20 years prior to now? I’m making that up, obviously, but it’s hard to ever guess what will be in the brief for a new identity.

My point, however, was a computer isn’t needed to make logos. Necessarily. Yes, at some point, it has to go through the machine for production. I’m speaking more about the creative process and advocating that Step One not involve a computer, a television, an iPod (or iPad) or Design Annual.

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Chasing Bear Identity

I decided to name my company Chasing Bear a few years ago. It’s a weird, nebulous concept that I ramble on about here. I should point out this company is primarily where I pursue my own personal art projects. I’m also a partner at The PARAGRAPH Project and we do really intersting stuff for anyone who’s interested.

So along with this very loose concept of what “Chasing Bear” meant came an indifference to a logo. “I probably shouldn’t use a bear as a mark for a company who has ‘Bear’ in their name, right?” I let it languish.

Until one day, my wife and I were browsing in an antique shop in the NC mountains. We came across this carved bear that was meant to hang on a wall. My wife told me it was perfect for my home office. I wasn’t used to being cleared for the purchase of mascots. I just wasn’t buying it (the bear). Fortunately, I eventually did purchase the bear. And when I got home, I hung it above my desk.

I eventually realized this bear was MY bear. And I figured out a way to make him say “Chasing” as well. I took a photo, adjusted some levels in Photoshop and then took a print to my local copy shop where I distorted the image. A quick change of the eye, and I was done. It all happened in a few hours.

The timeline for this endeavor was obviously outside the realm of any traditional client engagement. In fact, there was no timeline. Everything happened organically. I realize it’s not practical from this perspective. But my point is not one of time management. I’m hoping you might look beyond your normal sources of inspiration within the timeframe of any given project. And that the tablet or the mouse are put away for a bit. We (and our clients) might be better served if after reading the brief, we just go for a walk. Or visit an antique shop.