Like most brides to be, Wendy Blair Winkler spent more than a year planning her wedding. Unlike most wedding parties, her guests spent months building the event themselves on a farm in Free Union. Winkler modeled her wedding on experiences at Burning Man, an annual art festival held on the arid salt flats of transient Black Rock City, Nevada. She and her tribe of fire-wielding locals are just a few of Charlottesville’s growing collective of “burners,” the nickname given to event attendees. Their influence is building in the local arts scene, and if they have their way, you might get a taste of the Burning Man experience right here in Charlottesville without even knowing it.
Author: Elizabeth Derby
Visual artist Philip de Jong won’t content himself with creating beautiful work. In fact, he avoids contentment altogether.
“At some point as a trained photographer your job is to make anything look good,” he said. “If people describe my work as pretty, I feel insulted on some level because all it means is that I was present for something beautiful.”
Though de Jong cares about compositional finesse and “how light interacts and illuminates,” his artistic effort is a search for photographic connotations and annotations, hints of the “shared human experience.”
“A picture is what it is, it’s accurate, but the truth of a picture is extremely subjective,” he said. “I’m trying to harness some sort of visceral experience.”
The Charlottesville native believes discomfort often predicates such insight. After graduating from Ohio University with a master’s in photojournalism, he moved to Lake Tahoe with his wife and worked as a freelancer and a ski instructor. The lifestyle, he said, was “poverty with a view,” and it spurred creativity.
“There were a lot of divisions among the people who lived out there,” de Jong said. “A lot of relatively young people looking to do work on the edge.” He exhibited shows at galleries around town and even set up an artists’ collective to motivate sales between the haves and the have-nots.
Eventually, though, de Jong and his wife decided to start a family. “We were [both] raised with a certain amount of responsibility,” he said. “[We knew] that if we didn’t have a real career, there was an underlying guilt.” So they came back to Virginia, and de Jong set aside exhibitions.
“Discontent drives all of us, right?” he asked. “But Charlottesville is a very content place. We don’t have any edge. There’s no bite.”
Despite his new, more traditional lifestyle, de Jong continued his search. During his work as a photographer for Ethiopian Airlines’ in-flight magazine, he saw and sought to capture realities beyond the attention of tourists and international media.
In “Ethiopia, Ark of the Covenant,” a current exhibit at The Garage (and his first in several years), de Jong explores what he described in his artist statement as “contradictions everywhere”: modernization versus subsistence farming, deforestation versus dynamic landscapes, a dilapidated chapel that claimed to hold the true Ark of the Covenant.
“Ethiopia is a really proud culture, and they’re getting influenced from China, India, Brazil, and very heavily from the U.S.,” he said. “They came out of a really awful Communist situation. They know who they are but can’t explain who they are.”
But de Jong can’t ignore the limitations of his own perspective. “As a journalist, I have a tendency to oversimplify things,” he said. “I enter the story and then I exit. I’m not so foolish as to believe it’s purely objective.”
So where does de Jong’s truth come from?
“I think a lot of it happens after the fact,” he said. “There’s a lot of editing and waiting to understand the story you’re telling. You really don’t have a perfect view of it until you’re out.”
If critical evaluation is the source of his “few projects that have a voice and body together,” it also causes his resistance to comfort, to ease and easy imagery and the ethos of Instagram.
“I don’t really want to be part of a system that is just visual throw up: it lasts for an instant, it exists and then it doesn’t,” he said. “You want it to have meaning and impact.”
Philip de Jong’s exhibit “Ethiopia, Ark of the Covenant” will be on view at The Garage through September 28.
Categories
Cville Sabroso’s Latin celebration
Fanny Smedile is not a professional dancer. But at last year’s Cville Sabroso, she put on a colorful dancing dress and found herself transformed.
“When I wore the costume, I felt my folklore,” she said. “When I listened to the music, it took me back to my country. In that moment, I felt it in my blood.”
Born in Riobamba, Chimborazo, Ecuador and living in Charlottesville for the last eight years, Smedile handles community outreach for Sin Barreras, a nonprofit group that provides support services for local immigrants and partners with cultural arts project Luminaria Cville to produce Cville Sabroso, a Latin American dance and music festival.
Founded by musician and teacher Estela Knott, who described music and dance as “part of our natural way of communicating with each other and part of our heritage as human beings, ” Cville Sabroso’s inaugural event drew 500 people despite consistent rain.
“It was beautiful,” Knott said. “There were kids from different cultural backgrounds dancing. This little Latino boy, maybe 7 years old, was sitting on the ground with his sister when the Chinelos, a style of Mexican dance where they dress up in costumes with masks and sort of like bishops’ hats on, they were coming through. The boy, who’d grown up in Charlottesville his whole life, had this look on his face as if he was recognizing something he’d never actually seen before.”
This Saturday marks the second installment of the festival, which features authentic Latin food, kids’ activities, and live traditional music and folk dances.
Smedile choked up over the city’s 2013 proclamation of the day as one of annual celebration. “I was very excited and emotional, very happy and thankful that our mini dream came true,” she said. “I love this country, but in my heart my country is Ecuador. I want to show the richness of our traditions, our music, and our folklore.”
Building connection across cultures comes naturally to Knott, who calls herself Mex-alachian. “My mother is from Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, and my father is from the Shenandoah Valley, just over the mountain in Luray.”
Her mother’s annual Mexican fiestas had Knott performing for weddings and corporate events by age 10. Wider explorations began after she moved to Charlottesville and met her husband (Olivarez Trio bassist Dave Berzonsky) while playing African creole music.
After traveling through Latin America, Knott decided to create a casa de la cultura, a ‘house of culture’ akin to those she’d seen in Mexico, and from this Luminaria Cville was born.
Knott met Smedile at a Luminaria event and found they shared a common vision “of wanting to bring all of the cultures of Latin America and the Caribbean together, not just to celebrate in private communities, in churches and neighborhoods, but to actually come out into the community and show the rest of Charlottesville their culture.”
The fruit of their efforts is the increased confidence and trust from the local Latino community and the attendees from across the region.
“We had a Son Jarocho group from Veracruz, Mexico,” said Knott. “This little man came out..and he just started flatfooting, a Mexican style of clogging. He came out and danced for that song and then disappeared back into the audience, and I almost lost it,” she said. “It was exactly what I’d been hoping for.”
The Cville Sabroso Festival will be held on the McGuffey Art Center lawn on September 20.
Allison Mitchell helps people sort through and systematize the keeping of their stuff. But really, she says, they’re redefining self-love.
“The irony for my clients is that they fear losing something, so they keep everything, then they lose the something they really wanted to keep,” said Mitchell, a Charlottesville-based organizing consultant for Richmond firm Abundance Organizing. “The priority of things supersedes their priority of themselves.”
A former nurse, Mitchell was always attracted to helping others, but she first saw grief-induced attachment to objects when she visited the family of a friend who had passed away. “I went to drop off a meal,” she said. “All the medicines were there; the invaluable items were left behind; the bed was in the room. I thought it would have been a great thing for the family to not have to deal with that.”
A few years later, Mitchell’s husband noticed an upcoming seminar on organizing and encouraged her to attend. The speaker’s material felt incredibly familiar to Mitchell, outlining habits and techniques she already possessed—and now that speaker is her boss.
At Abundance Organizing, “We put a system and flow together for clients,” Mitchell said. She described the practice as a combination of long-term maintenance as well as immediate overhauls, mentoring for order in collaboration with the unique needs and desires of her clients. “It’s not our way or the highway,” she said.
Her co-created solutions include color-coding objects with stickers for a visual learner and storing cereal bowls for children in cabinets where they can reach them and make their own breakfasts.
Mitchell is the first to admit, though, that there’s no magic bullet for personal organizing. But because she received her bachelor’s degree in biology, she appreciates even her negative results. “That’s just what didn’t work,” she said. “I don’t see it as a failure, just another thing we tried.”
Mitchell’s flexibility emerges by necessity. Clients range from people in gated communities to trailers, spanning all levels of education, types of families, and other situational factors like folks who are downsizing or those who are overwhelmed by the many facets of daily life. “Some people need to normalize their clutter, and some just need help in the kitchen,” Mitchell said.
Some of Mitchell’s clients do suffer brain-based issues, and she guides their process with a more clinical approach to organizing, learned during her Chronic Disorganization Specialist certification. But these individuals’ lives are very different than what you may have seen on TV. “‘Hoarders’ is not the reality of living in a chronically disordered space,” she said. “I had a traumatic brain injury client who was orderly and now has chaos because of this health crisis. There are clients who have the beginning of MS, clients with depression or anxiety.”
These days, Mitchell’s greatest professional joy is bringing light into darkness, clearing physical—and often emotional—clutter to make room for happiness. “Clients are energized when we leave, and we’re exhausted,” she said with a laugh. It’s a price she’s more than willing to pay to help others restore a lost sense of purpose and/or self-worth.
“People put such energy and anxiety into their objects, which takes it from themselves,” she said. “Do what works for you. Don’t have the guilt and the emotion attached to how that process should work. Value your own priorities. You should keep that lamp because—why? Did you sit under it while your dad read fairy tales to you?”
Mitchell explained that it often takes a fall guy, an outside person, to reassure her clients that what they really want to do—be it store bowls near the floor or throw away parents’ hand-me-downs—is a perfectly valid way to live their lives. “Our generation is so different from the one before because in generations past your inheritance was your stuff. But it’s O.K. to say no if we have the resources to purchase what we want.”
Ultimately, she said, our objects should act as conduits. “Most of your readers probably never ate on the fine china from their wedding —why not? If there are no memories associated with an object, so what if it breaks? Use it!”
The first time I read my work in front of an audience, I knew something had changed. The piece evolved as it left my lips, transforming the frisson I’d felt at the writing table into a brief but visceral tether with others. Listening to authors read their works, I understand the real invitation: to connect across private, deeply personal expression in a public space.
“As with a concert, or a play, or an opening, you’d come to experience art,” said Julia Kudravetz, one of the organizers of The Bridge PAI’s reading series. “But again, there’s that group energy that can’t be discounted—hearing a piece performed out loud can be totally different than on the page.”
The series, which hosts monthly readings by local and well-known non-local authors of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, aims to build literary connections across a number of boundaries.
A writer herself, Kudravetz (who received her MFA from the Johns Hopkins writing seminars) partnered with poet Amie Whittemore, who received her MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, to create a live experience in a social and non-commercial environment, to encourage word lovers to engage with writing and each other without an overly academic emphasis.
“The location allows us to draw on the energy of Downtown while also bringing in graduate students from UVA,” Whittemore said.
This month’s reading promises the best of many worlds. Co-sponsored by The Virginia Quarterly Review, in special collaboration with the UVA Contemporary Poetry & Poetics Working Group, Friday’s event will feature widely published poets Brian Teare, a former NEA Fellow and assistant professor at Temple University, and James Thomas Miller, who teaches creative writing at the University of Toledo, as well as short story writer and novelist Elliott Holt, recently named one of Time’s “21 Female Authors You Should be Reading.”
The Pushcart Prize-winning Holt described how a community of kindred spirits encouraged her evolution to full-time creative. The VQR contributor began writing fiction as a very young girl, but her father’s suggestion that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a copywriter stuck with her. “At age 8 I got it into my head that I could write ads to pay the bills and write on the side,” she said, “And that’s exactly what I did.”
After stints with agencies in Moscow, London, Amsterdam, and New York, she applied to the MFA program at Brooklyn College. “As soon as I started [my program], I felt like I was with my people,” she said. “I didn’t quit my full-time job right away, but as I was starting to get published, I thought ‘O.K., I’m never going to make it just writing,’ but I felt secure enough to freelance.”
Now the author, who edits manuscripts and teaches when she can, finds inspiration in “the absurdities of advertising speak” as well as her childhood in D.C. The “political machine” informed many ideas in her first novel, You Are One of Them. “You can’t grow up here and not be aware of the way people are constructed and presented. Politicians focus group their personalities,” she said. “I love reading and writing stories about the secrets we keep, the tension between the self we reveal and the self we hide.”
But more than anything else, “language itself really excites me,” said the author. “Writing that has some sort of crackle below the surface….There’s a kind of fire in it.”
Hear Elliott Holt, Brian Teare, and James Miller read from their work at 7pm on Friday at the Bridge PAI.
Physics teacher Matt Shields, who recently received a 2014 MIT Inspirational Teacher Award for his work both in and out of the classroom with students at Charlottesville High School, never planned to be a teacher.
“Physics was almost an accident. I think I got a C in physics in college,” Shields said, adding that his master’s degree is in mechanical engineering. He worked as an engineer in Washington, D.C., and as a web developer at Monticello.
“I started teaching on a whim, and there was a physics opening,” he said.
But now, after six years at the helm of lessons about force, torque, and drag, Shields recognizes that his own sense of deep curiosity triggers the passion he shares with his students.
“I’m always trying to get to the root of things, and physics is always the answer to that,” he said.
The Fairfax native and Wahoo undergrad (who went on to get his Ph.D. in curriculum and instruction from UVA) described himself as “one of those kids walking down the street asking why.” Physics, he said, helps decipher the answers to universal mysteries. “Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating because it’s such an easy class to make interesting,” he said. “ I think every kid has an interest in how the world works. Why do stars and black holes work? What is dark matter? How does the Internet work? These are things I can pull out if class ever gets boring.”
Shields connects with the many students who sing his praises by not only appreciating their desire to learn but allowing it to guide their in-class experiences. After transferring from Albemarle to CHS, he opened the floor to his kids. Their response, he said, changed everything.
“The kids were learning because they wanted to,” as traditional learning standards became embedded in interesting educational experiences. He recalled an experiment when his students decided to send a weather balloon into space with a camera attached. “Doing that successfully required all kinds of calculations of volume and buoyancy and drag and height, and we learned about GPS and radio location and meteorology and wind stream,” he said. “We interacted with the community, with the Charlottesville Radio Club. It was really enriching, and I’m sure we crushed some standards.”
Shields’ philosophy has earned him the adoration of hundreds of students, including Emily Keeley, the MIT freshman who nominated him for this year’s Inspirational Teacher Award, which is given every year to a selection of 25-30 high school teachers, coaches, and counselors from around the world. Emily and her twin sister, Charlotte, took Shields’ physics class instead of lunch their junior year.
“It’s hard for me to take much credit because I thought they were going to be very successful whether teachers helped or got in their way,” Shields said.
He invited the sisters to participate in BACON ( “Best All aRound Club Of Nerds”), the student-run science club and “umbrella group for students nerding out about stuff,” as Shields, who acts as supervisor, described it.
“I was excited to bring them in and give them free rein, to say ‘If I gave you resources, what would you do with it?’” he said.
The Keeleys created Science Projects Advising and Mentoring, or SPAM, to connect high school science students with UVA teachers to participate in their real-world research projects. It was the sort of deeply engaged, above-and-beyond concept Shields has come to expect.
“Most science projects are like, ‘Here is my Styrofoam model of the planet,’” he said with a laugh. “One of the places the school system falls short is when students fail to meet certain requirements or standards, they can fall through the cracks. I try to find some of those students who are maybe already doing great things or headed to engineering or science and see if I can push or encourage them to go bigger or deeper.”
At heart, Shields said, he’s just a guy who loves to learn and act as an advocate for kids. He gives them resources to further encourage them to take the wheel of their own curriculums—and lifelong educations.
“That’s been the secret to our success. My first year I saw that I could just ask them what they’re interested in and say, ‘Yeah, I’m all about that. Kids these days are just brimming with all kinds of wild stuff,” he said. “I feel like my job is just to get out of the way.”
“I don’t know why, but design is pretty much all I think about all the time. Much to my wife’s dismay.” Master woodworker and furniture maker Blaise Gaston laughed, fully aware that the affection he lavishes on his work is the sort many reserve for first loves. Which, in a way, it is.
“I remember turning a cherry wood candlestick when I was perhaps 17, and it was unusual, different from what was woodworked in the stores,” he said from his studio and woodshop in Earlysville. “I thought, ‘Wow, I could do this with all sorts of things.’ I’ve never forgotten what it felt like to turn that candlestick and think of how many different options there were.”
Gaston has more than 40 years of experience creating wooden structures for the home, including a decade crafting cabinets, doors, window frames, and more for leading architectural millworking firm Gaston & Wyatt, which he founded with friends Chris Murray and Richard Wyatt in 1979. For the past 20 years, he’s designed and made contemporary, curvaceous fine art furniture for his independent company, Blaise Gaston Furniture.
“Woodworking varies,” he explained. “Some people make large scale pieces all day long, and some work only with hand tools and make very fine, delicate pieces of furniture. I’m somewhere in the middle. I use plenty of power tools, but I don’t do huge productions of things.” Intertwined, a glass-topped cocktail table set on spiraling bubinga wood legs that sells for $1,980, is the most factory-like thing Gaston said he’s done, creating 50 at one time.
The majority of Gaston’s unique designs live in homes across the country, but his publicly commissioned pieces can be seen across the city and the state, from the doors and dome room windows at Monticello to building fronts on the Downtown Mall. “I did pieces for the Virginia Discovery Museum when it first started 30 years ago,” he said. “I made a giant tongue out of wood, and kids would climb through the mouth to use it as a slide.”
Bitten by the bug
Gaston began his woodworking career when he was 9 and received lessons for Christmas. “I don’t think I asked for them,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t remember anything I made except a steering wheel for a go-kart.”
Tutelage in the backyard workshop of a neighborhood general contractor, followed by junior high woodshop and a stint in boarding school “where I did quite a bit of woodworking,” led to Rochester Institute of Technology’s School for American Crafts and a four year BFA in furniture design. “Most of the people were older and had left other careers because they wanted to make furniture,” he said. “We’d work from eight in the morning to midnight, six to seven days a week.”
He described how the shop had a wall of windows, so students managed to climb inside even when they weren’t supposed to be there. “It was an extraordinary school. I’m still good friends with a few of those people.”
After school, Gaston took a job shoveling gravel for $3.25/hour before working as a door- and hamlet-maker for Shelter Associates. He also got a studio at McGuffey Art Center, making the fine art furniture he’d eventually build into his own career.
Labor of love
Though his portfolio includes a few small batch productions of cocktail and side tables, most of Gaston’s pieces are developed on commission. Each marries the artist’s organic aesthetic with homeowners’ specific desires. “It’s an exciting process for the customer as well as for me, creating something that no one else has,” he said.
Mass-produced furniture costs less to purchase because it takes so little time in comparison to handmade work. “There’s a huge amount of figuring out how to make it first,” Gaston said. “We’ll talk about what they like about my work, then I do sketches and they give feedback, then I do formal drawings and small models and full sized models if necessary. A custom piece can take anywhere from 50 to 400 hours.”
Aside from the design and construction of his house and studio in the woods, the largest piece Gaston ever built was a 10′-tall walnut bar with a built-in sink, wine refrigerator, and cabinets. Using wood collected on the owner’s farm, he cut oversized pieces, let them acclimate, then flattened, machined, cut, and assembled them. “It weighed a massive amount and had to be lifted with two large mechanical lifts,” he said. “We almost dropped it getting it up there, but we got it in place. It was very exciting. Terrifying. And it’s all on film.”
Though Gaston’s passion for beautiful wood propels these labors of love, he’s discovered the dream of design to be just as alluring as the final product. “I guess most people say the best part of the process is when they put the finish on and can see how good it looks,” he said. “More and more for me it’s coming up with the design. Then the mind just starts floating. I start doodling. Everything looks lousy for hours, and then all of a sudden something looks interesting. It’s kind of torturous, but I break through and find something I like, and then it’s pretty wonderful.”
Everybody’s an amateur photographer these days, using smartphone cameras and Instagram filters to create quick, easy, and brighter-than-life ‘art’. But in curator June Collmer’s latest exhibit, “The World of Printmaking,” she’s going to bat for a different aesthetic.
“It’s the lines,” the local photographer said in an interview at the Vinegar Hill Café in the Jefferson School City Center, where the group show of etchings, intaglios, lithographs, linoleum and screen prints hangs. “That’s why I like black and white photography so much—color distracts from the lines of a piece.”
A onetime printmaker herself, Collmer’s attraction to subtle beauty reveals itself in the works of all seven artists. Featuring everyday subjects in muted colors, the prints and etchings reject easy image creation in favor of painstaking translation—the physical world into tactile likeness.
Consider Nelson County printer Lana Lambert, who transfers sketches of local flora and fauna onto linoleum blocks. Using her industrial-era letterpress machine, she hand inks and presses each one of her works onto handmade paper.
Brooke Inman, a VCU adjunct instructor in painting and printmaking, likewise embraces the DIY approach. Her detailed prints balance white space and dogs, stones, and other commonplace objects.
Scottsville native Liz Cherry Jones uses a combination of silk screening and relief printing on paper and fabric in her ongoing series “Text and Textiles.” Each letter-pressed collage reflects components that recall colonial Americana, a time when wool was a work of art and technique triumphed speed.
Emily King also screen prints paper and fabrics, notably panels of traditional Japanese skirts. After studying abroad in Osaka, Japan, she recaptured memories as art, using Japanese letters and language and reprints of photos she bitmapped in Photoshop before printing. As she commented in her artist’s statement, “the rise of technology interjecting itself into art is a curious thing.”
Kelleyann Gordon combines art, tech, and nature with solar plates. Printed on glass or transparent acetate, original images are transferred to steel when a thin layer of photosensitive polymer hardens with exposure to UV light. Her piece “Salem Fair” showcases the process—one photograph, one etched solar plate, and one print—with three versions of a city densely packed around a Ferris wheel.
Ellen Moore Osborne creates intaglios, prints made with plates that have been etched by tools like steel or diamond-tipped needles. In the case of “Deafened by the Divine,” “Ironworks,” and “Idle Times,” she used nitric acid to etch images onto zinc metal sheets, then inked, buffed, and printed the resulting transfers by hand.
Rachel Singel’s intaglios are more abstract and almost vertigo-inducing. Every inch of her dense swirls—which look like twining branches of birds’ nests or cross sections of the world’s oldest tree—were etched by hand.
“People forget that you can use a small block that costs basically nothing and come up with something beautiful that can be reprinted,” Collmer said. She hopes exhibit visitors will imagine what’s possible right in their own backyards, not only in the use of everyday materials and subjects to inspire art, but in visiting the Jefferson School City Center as well.
During Collmer’s outreach, she visited nearby neighborhoods, going door-to-door in a way that, like her exhibit, invokes nostalgia for a simpler time. “People in the community have been very open, and that’s been a wonderful part of curating this,” she said. “Just getting to know people.”
“The World of Printmaking” will be on display at the Jefferson School City Center through August 31.
You don’t often see sculptors in the library at work on invisible projects, but Justin Poe is an exception.
“When I started out, I did these 2″ x 3″ wide sculptures, and I carried everything around in my backpack,” said the Charlottesville-based artist. “I worked in public, in libraries and restaurants, and got a lot of real-time feedback. I just started working smaller and smaller, and it got to the point where people stopped asking because they couldn’t see it.”
The Florida native and 2012 graduate of Guilford College in North Carolina creates “detailed small-scale architectural landscapes.” His miniature houses, apartment buildings, and cabins anchor to natural surfaces and found objects like moss-capped stones and hermit crab shells.
“The smallest house I ever made was a size of a grain of salt,” Poe said. To display that piece, he mounted the house to a quarter-inch nail head and created a little forest around it.
He framed the work with a magnifying lens for viewers, though he didn’t use one himself. “I wanted to reach the epitome of working without a microscope or magnifying glass,” he explained.
So how the hell does he make such tiny, intricate objects?
Practice, apparently. Poe said he’s gotten to the point “where I don’t need tweezers, even. I shave a toothpick to a small point, touch it to glue, dab most of the glue off, and use that to adhere pieces together. That way I get no friction from tweezers.”
Patience is another key. To make his smallest houses, Poe applies a layer of paint to a surface, carves off the edges with an X-acto knife, applies another layer, carves again, and so on. It’s a process he described as “kind of like 3D printing, but manual.”
He’s always liked to look at things in fine detail. “Like moss on a rock, I’m instantly drawn into that,” he said. “It’s a little self-contained world.”
Poe got his start as a technical theater major with a focus in set design. His interest in miniature structures piqued when he began making small-scale models of sets.
“I kind of realized that if I’d been doing something larger, people would be less inclined to buy it as rapidly,” he said.
His forays into small sculpture confirmed his belief that people tended to value small-scale intricacy more than large-scale intricacy. In other words, it’s easier to identify (and therefore applaud) time-consuming techniques over complicated concepts.
“I hate when people look at my work and think they can do the same things, though I fall prey to that too,” he said. “Working really small-scale blows that notion out of the water. That’s a huge benefit to working smaller and smaller over time.”
After graduation, Poe went back to Guilford for a fourth year in sculpture. Inspired by Willard Wigan, a micro-sculptor whose work is small enough to pass through the eye of a needle, Poe pursued the theme of detailed small-scale architectural landscapes in his thesis. In Charlottesville he works with sculptor and contractor Jason Roberson and plans to apply to UVA’s graduate School of Architecture.
Working with toothpicks, cardboard from boxes, and “whatever is free and immediately available,” Poe encourages viewers to reframe their understanding of what it means to be “life-sized.” As a personal practice, this shift in perception has greatly colored the artist’s worldview.
“When you focus in on this really small scale your eyes have to adjust,” he said. “They become so adjusted everything else looks blurry. It enters you into this Zen-like state. When you’re focused on this one small spot, the rest of the world disappears.”
Cars rush along a busy street near downtown Charlottesville, bowing day lilies that cluster beside the driveway of Chad and Rebecca Morgan’s early 20th-century home. But when you stand in the heart of the kitchen—a straight shot from the sidewalk through the front door and down the hallway—you could be a million miles from anywhere.
“It’s like living in a tree house,” said Rebecca, who worked with her husband, as well as architect Matt Griffith from In Situ Studio, and contractor Mike Ball to renovate the home they share with their two sons, ages 10 months and 3 years. “You can see green from every window.”
Light pours in from everywhere, suffusing the blue-gray walls and the variegated gray countertops with luminous calm. A four-paned window opens above the stainless steel apron front sink, which is flanked by a Sub-Zero glass-front refrigerator and an L-shaped bar. Two more windows brighten the informal dining room, which doubles as a play space, while another nestles in the alcove above a desktop computer on a built-in shelf.
From the helm of the kitchen, Morgan can easily access the back door and mudroom, where groceries are brought in, the butler’s pantry, which holds a wine fridge, glasses, and a baby changing station, and the play area and living room, where her family spends most of its time.
“We kept the focus on being open and functional,” Morgan said. “We wanted to make this a place where people would feel comfortable gathering.” The ceilings are high and the furniture minimal, interspersed with colorful details like jazz festival prints and a Little Tykes basketball hoop. Most of the kitchen storage is tucked out of sight, with a pantry behind a paneled pocket door, a butler’s pantry to minimize cabinets in the kitchen, and additional storage in the adjacent mudroom.
The overall effect is airy and spacious, simple without feeling sparse. The space just flows, an achievement that sounds much easier than it was.
Before they moved to Charlottesville, the Morgans fell in love with the historical architecture in San Francisco. They found their forever home here, and it had beautiful bones, but the century-old structure needed an update. Working with Chad’s college roommate, an architect from Raleigh, they conceived a total renovation to lighten, brighten, and open the structure. The dark and narrow kitchen, with heavy cabinetry and an awkward corner that pointed inward instead of out, became a major focus of the overhaul.
“It was like weaving an addition into an existing house,” said Mike Ball, who helped the couple finalize their plans and whose local firm, Element Construction, led the five-month-long project. “Half the kitchen was existing, so we gutted that. We had to remove one wall, which was load bearing, and we had to take it apart brick by brick. The new wall needed to match the old one, and these [bricks] were unusual, maybe handmade on site, so we had to painstakingly chip each one free and clean it.”
Once the footprint of the house was finalized, the team widened windows and built custom cabinetry, including the overhead paneling of the entrance to the mudroom. Instead of an open doorway, Ball said, the overhang defined the space and “added a sense of continuation around the whole kitchen.”
Seamless transitions between spaces are aided by continuous details in multiple rooms, including the countertops’ marble-like finish and maple cabinets, painted white, that disguised filing or cutlery drawers.
Other details were added to mimic those of the original structure. Ceiling trim was designed to match the original trim, and window frames were sourced online to most closely reflect the antique double-paned originals. Ball even found a barn in North Carolina made of 1900s-era heart pine, vertical grained and golden, to match the original flooring.
“I never wanted someone to feel like they had crossed the threshold from old to new,” Morgan said. “I hoped they would just think this is the way the house always was.”
Their dedication to uninterrupted flow has resulted in “a great use of space where nothing is wasted,” Ball said. “It’s a gracious area.” Now the kitchen transitions easily from cocktail hour to little boys’ pizza parties, and every angle radiates calm. It’s the peaceful heart of an interior marrying past and present.
After the Morgans moved into the house, Chad framed two sets of plans, one of the house’s original structure and one of its updates. Rebecca hung them in the formal dining room alongside an undated black and white photo of the house that they found in the attic. When asked how reality compares to the dream on paper, Rebecca smiled broadly. “This is even better.”
The Breakdown
Square footage
Kitchen (including pantry and built-in desk): 345 sq. ft.
Informal dining room: 225 sq. ft.
Den (playroom/breakfast nook): 195 sq. ft.
Mudroom including cubbies: 40 sq. ft.
Butler’s pantry: 55 sq. ft.
Primary materials or finishes
Super White Granite from Cogswell Stone
painted custom maple cabinets
vertical grain heart pine floor reclaimed from a
North Carolina barn.
Lighting
Kitchen peninsula lights: Progress Lighting Crystal Single Light Mini
Butler pantry light: Artcraft Light AC193 Coventry Three-Light
Appliances and plumbing fixtures Range: Wolf R366 six-burner 36″ gas range
Hood: Wolf with exterior blower
Refrigerator: Sub-Zero B1-36UG over-and-under with glass door
Sink: Porcher 35140-01 London 36″ Farmhouse
Faucet: Hansgrohe Interaktiv S