Using minimal tools and a simple technique of bending, interweaving, and fastening together sticks, artist Patrick Dougherty creates works of art inseparable with nature and the landscape.
With a dazzling variety of forms seamlessly intertwined with their context, his sculptures evoke fantastical images of nests, cocoons, cones, castles, and beehives. Over the last twenty-five years, Dougherty has built more than two hundred works throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia that range from stand-alone structures to a kind of modern primitive architecture—every piece mesmerizing in its ability to fly through trees, overtake buildings, and virtually defy gravity. Stickwork, Dougherty's first monograph, features thirty-eight of his organic, dynamic works that twist the line between architecture, landscape, and art.
It's a situation we are all acquainted with: planning to visit friends in an unfamiliar part of the city, you draw yourself a rudimentary map with detailed directions.
In March 2008, graphic designer Kris Harzinski founded the Hand Drawn Map Association in order to collect just such drawings of the everyday. Fascinated by these accidental records of a moment in time, he soon amassed a wide variety of maps, ranging from simple directions to fictional maps, to maps of unusual places, including examples drawn by well-known historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Shackleton, and Alexander Calder. From Here to There celebrates these ephemeral documents—usually forgotten or tossed aside after having served their purpose—giving them their due as artifacts representing stories from people's lives around the world.
"The ideal artist is unwilling to sacrifice his or her individuality to anything or anyone, particularly commercialism or outside control. Such artists often work in seclusion and their creations are uniquely pure. Gordon Brinckle is such an artist. [Messick's] photographs are both tender and authentic in the greatest sense, and I found myself as close to his subject as I ever could have hoped to be." —Albert Maysles, documentary filmmaker (Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens)
In The Projectionist, Messick captures every detail of Brinckle's colorful fantasy world, including Brinckle's original artwork, architectural plans, drawings, and linoleum prints of imaginary movie theaters, ticket stubs, and usher uniform designs. An essay by curator Brooke Davis Anderson of the American Folk Art Museum looks at Gordon's work in the context of outsider art, and a foreword by artist, curator, and author Mark Sloan discusses Messick's photographic work.
