Semi-Finals

The Hood Residency at Allerton Park and Retreat Center asked some further questions. Here are excerpts from my response.

Can you give us a little more background on you and your work?

I actively explore the world and I need quiet time to process it. I use photography as a tool that holds the fleeting moments which catch my attention. My own and others’ archives provide material to look at closely, find patterns, and explore further.

I work from my identity as a white gay male. In my twenties, I was out and proud, a participant in the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979. As I’ve matured, my inner queer perspective informs every photograph regardless of its subject. It’s a more subtle telling, inviting the viewer into a conversation beyond labels about the core of our  lives.

I find deep peace in Buddhist meditation and was a meditation instructor and retreat leader for many years. My photography is in dialogue with meditation: holding a camera shifts my perception into a visual mode; making images before there is language to name them, discovering myself in the photograph..

I make objects to be held; small prints, zines, fortune tellers. My zines are tightly structured objects though the form itself is casual. They tell personal stories, hold layers of meaning, hide and reveal information, lean into the informality of a printed page passed from friend to friend. They lead to conversations.

What do you know about Allerton Park?

I first learned of the Park and Robert Allerton through the portrait, Man in Black, painted by Glyn Philpot while he was Robert’s guest at The Farms. The wall text described Robert as a patron of the arts who had a long relationship with Glyn. I wanted to know more.

Reading biographies of Robert and The Farms, three things jumped out as he turned twenty-five in 1898: 

• he burned his art work before leaving Europe; 
• he decorated his outhouse at The Farms with Toulouse-Lautrec posters; 
• by the end of the summer, he was heading back to Europe with an architect friend to find inspiration for his home in Piatt County.

What passion and determination, a whirlwind of change! 

Robert imposed a formal order, in the house and in the gardens which interacts with the untamed as we move through the landscape, the woods and fields, and come upon sculptures and open spaces. He created a structure which protected his guests, within which they could relax, take off their starched collars and corsets, put on kimonos and togas. Robert messed with form, designing even the kitchen garden, making the practical, beautiful. He was constantly navigating public and private.

My research has shown me Robert’s gifts to the Art Institute, his embrace of a range of masculinity, from Donoghue’s lithe, youthful Sophocles Leading the Chorus of Victory to Rodin’s muscular, mature, contorted Adam; the miniature porcelain Monkey Band from eighteenth-century Germany perhaps bridges Robert’s time studying in Munich to the Chinese Musicians at Allerton Park. 

I journeyed to the Allerton Public Library to study their early Piatt County atlases and to hold their cabinet cards from the 1890s, and then walked some of the trails at Allerton Park to have a beginning feel for the land. I have scheduled a day at the University of Illinois library to study the photographs in their archives.

What is the project you hope to accomplish during the residency at Allerton?

What does Robert Allerton have to say to me, 128 years after he began what is now Allerton Park? He navigated the constraints of his time to create a secure intimate space where he could more fully live his life. 

What of those initial few months from 1898 is still present, held in the land, in the prairie, in the river flood plain, in the upland woods, in the sunlight and the dark shadows? What is in the old photographs? 

Having done much research, the residency is a time to let it go. To be there, as a practice retreat, a concentrated time to make art, for the magic of walking with a camera to create a portal into the past.

I will take early morning walks, as Robert did with his dogs, dogs that were also his ears, compensating for his hearing loss. 

What will I hear? How will I communicate that in photographs? 

Out of this questioning will come cabinet cards that can be held, shuffled, studied; concrete manifestations of living at The Farms.

How do you envision Allerton influencing your area of focus? 

Allerton Park is very much Robert Allerton’s creation. Trained as an artist, a world traveler, he brought a cultured sophistication to his home far from an urban center, hosted artists to live and work, invited friends from Chicago to visit, managed the many farms, and took quiet walks alone. He embodied a strength and a vulnerability, attributes needed to make art. 

I imagine myself as Robert’s guest, the latest in a long line of artists at The Farms, a place of creative refuge. I will seek “desire lines” in the landscape, paths made across the meadows, through the woods; lines that connect me to cultural forebearers, like Robert; desires that run through me, that are revealed in the flights of birds, the eddies in a river, the wind rustling the leaves of grass.

From my time in residence, my art will offer others an entry to living at The Farms, to the rich world that Robert built.

What dates work for your schedule?

The Sangamon River is at maximum flow in April and May. I would like to experience being “on the banks of the raging Sangamon” as the Piatt County Republican described the river when Robert arrived in May of 1898. That word, raging, embodies what I imagine Robert was experiencing, the vibrancy of his youth and the opportunity to create what he wants of the land. I want to metaphorically step into that river, feel its force, see where it takes me.

[My earlier post from my applicatoin to the residency.]

Robert Allerton and architect John Borie stand on the porch of Allerton's cottage, ca 1899
University of Illinois Archives, Box 31/13/5 Allerton Park Collection 1848-2003