Doug Haight's Cuba Photos & Adventures at Perspective Gallery

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Doug Haight has turned his camera lens to Cuba numerous times over the years, producing a must-see exhibit on display this June at Perspective Photo Gallery in Evanston. This conversation covers why Haight finds Cuba captivating, just what a Wandering Yuma is and where he plans to photograph next. Visit doughaight.com to see his online portfolio.

From perspectivegallery.org

Wandering Yuma | Doug Haight

In the streets of Havana, 'Yuma' is the word locals use to refer to American visitors. Photographer Doug Haight found it to be the perfect title for his upcoming exhibit.

“In Havana, I’ve roamed the streets from before dawn to past dusk,” Haight says. “I’ve been invited into strangers’ homes and made good friends.”

In Havana, Haight also finds a study in contradictions.

“I’m entranced by Havana’s crumbling beauty and taken in by its open and welcoming people. At the same time, I’m saddened by its isolation, disheartened by its apathy and worried about its changes.”

To Haight, Cuba’s contradictions provide a compelling, if unsolvable, puzzle.

“I cannot resist picking up another piece to see where it fits,” he says. “Exploration leads to encounter, and encounter leads to understanding.”

To convey that puzzle, “Wandering Yuma” presents images from crosscurrents of everyday life in Cuba, from young ballet dancers to butchers, from offerings to the sea to street parties; all displayed in a salon-style exhibit of more than 50 images created from multiple visits to the island.

For over 20 years, Doug Haight has been a photographer and video producer. His work has been featured in festivals, gallery shows, and publications including the New York Times. He is the owner of Evanston-based Fortune Fish Films.

The exhibit will be on display at Perspective Gallery, 1310 Chicago Avenue, May 31 - July 1. The public is invited to an artists' reception on Saturday, June 2, 5-7 p,m. There will be an artist talk on Thursday, June 21 at 7 p.m. All events are free of charge.

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The Lisa D Show is a podcast celebrating and elevating creatives, featuring 20-minute, unedited conversations that mimic the live-radio vibe, purposefully low tech. Contact host Lisa Degliantoni at thelisadshow[at]gmail.com

LP Lundy Photographs Lake Michigan's Many Moods

LP Lundy wears many hats and in this podcast we focus on his work as a photographer. Lundy has been taking photos of Lake Michigan from the same location for a few years, at the waterfront facing East from the Northwestern Campus, capturing the moods, beauty and awesomeness of our lake neighbor.

This February Lundy’s Lake Michigan horizon portraits are on display at Backlot Coffee, 2006 Central Street. In this interview we talk about photography as a method to build relationships with your community and natural world.

Lake Michigan is blocks from Lundy’s house, a quick bike ride and an entity he is addicted (in a good way) to photographing it at the same day, every day...a source of inspiration.

Below is an example of the work on display at Backlot, all for sale with 100% going to the artist. Reach Lundy direct at lundy813[at]gmail.com. Lundy's work is on display this March at Creative Coworking, 922 Davis Street in Evanston.

LP Lundy Bio                                 

LP (Larry) Lundy has been a production designer for 35 years. Born in Queens, New York, he graduated from the State University College at Buffalo with a BFA in painting and sculpture. Lundy was a founding member of Hallwalls Art Center, along with Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo and other artists in Buffalo in 1975, where he curated DADADAY (1976) and DADADAY 100 (2016), and the Buffalo Film Festival. Lundy produced a multi-media installation Urban Animal at ArtPark (1978). He developed Writeratio, to give writers an opportunity to read from their works. His art has been shown at The New Museum (NYC), A Space (Toronto), Art Institute of Chicago, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), and 33 Contemporary in Chicago among other venues.

Was a member of Randolph Street Gallery and curated the Loop Show (1981) at the historic Fisher Building in Chicago. Designed murals for the Mother’s of Perry Children’s Center in Buffalo through the CETA Program (1978). His art writing has appeared in The New Art Examiner, the Chicago Reader, the Journal of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lundy's set design work has been seen in film and TV productions such as High Fidelity, ER, The Babe, Flatliners, Chicago Hope, R Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet, Grand Piano, Shameless, Sense8 and Jupiter Ascending. He has twice won the Best of the Midwest Film Festival Best Art Direction Award, in 2002 and 2005.

He has taught production design at Columbia College from 2007 through 2012 and at Northwestern in 2011. He will be teaching at DePaul University beginning in March of 2018.

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The Lisa D Show is a podcast celebrating creatives, featuring 20-minute, unedited conversations that mimic the live-radio vibe, low tech on purpose. Reach out to host Lisa Degliantoni at thelisadshow[at]gmail.com

1100 Florence in West Evanston started as a Polish Meat Shop, then became Greenleaf Cabinets and now houses art and events, and sometimes podcast interviews. Learn more at 1100florence.com. Photograph of 1100 Florence taken by Joerg Metzner at the I Love Evanston Pop Up on February 9, 2018, after a magnificent snow storm

Joerg Metzner's Photography Begs Us to Let Go of Knowing

Photographer Joerg Metzner believes things happen when you let go of knowing and just let things come to you. This is expressed in his upcoming photography exhibit “Tomorrow Never Knows”, March 2-5, at 1100 Florence gallery in Evanston.

In this podcast we talk about the surreal and meditative nature of his photography that “breathes light” into Joerg’s life. With incredible craftsmanship and deep intention, Joerg uses photography to chronicle his community in a way that asks people to stop and pause and look deeply at the world around them.

Previews of the “Tomorrow Never Knows” show are available at www.joerg-metzner.com. The public is invited to the opening reception March 2, 6-9p and an Artist Talk: Sunday, March 4 at 2p.
Follow Joerg on Instagram at joergmetzner

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The Lisa D Show is a podcast celebrating creatives, featuring 20-minute, unedited conversations that mimic the live-radio vibe, low tech on purpose. Reach out to host Lisa Degliantoni at thelisadshow[at]gmail.com

1100 Florence in West Evanston started as a Polish Meat Shop, then became Greenleaf Cabinets and now houses art and events, and sometimes podcast interviews. Learn more at 1100florence.com. Photograph of 1100 Florence taken by Joerg Metzner at the I Love Evanston Pop Up on February 9, 2018, after a magnificent snow storm.

Photographer Jessica Kaplan on The Lisa D Show

Today on The Lisa D Show podcast we talk to photographer Jessica Kaplan, who captures candid portraits, fine art, architecture, people, streets, and more with her iPhone or camera. We talk about Jessica’s journey becoming a photographer, where she cultivates new skills to shoot the images she wants, and we also touch on the skills she uses from a previous life as WTTW line producer to draw out her subjects. The best part of being a photographer so far? Having something “tangible” that allows her to engage with the audience about.





Meet Jessica tonight at Backlot  offee for an opening reception of her work on display thru November. Visit her website and online store at jessicakaplanphoto.com and follow her on Instagram at JessicaKaplanPhotography. We reference the photo below in the interview, "American Gothic".

From jessicakaplanphoto.com:

Thank you for stopping by! I love to capture moments in a style that evokes confidence and intention. My natural light photography has a journalistic feel, featuring rich tones, depth and expert composition, inspired by my background in television news and as a storyteller.

Whether you are looking for an updated headshot, a portrait of your child, inspiring stock or custom photography for your own business, or an expertly framed image to hang on your wall, I am so glad you've stopped by for a visit!

My passion for storytelling began as a tween and evolved at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. That launched my 14-year career in the news business at WTTW, Chicago’s PBS station. Although I'm no longer in news, my passion for connection through storytelling still exists through the lens of my Canon DSLR and my iPhone 6.

I enjoy freezing time by capturing a look, an expression, joys and struggles. I love photographing people of all ages, in active moments or in quiet reflection. I work in both black and white and color, and I love creating natural light candid portraits.

I find inspiration on the street, in a new city, at the beach, in the water, in patterns in the sand. I celebrate wood, rust, texture and geometry. Looking up, looking down, looking into people’s eyes and watching children play are particularly satisfying. Depth and movement provide extra encouragement.

I am patient, yet persistent. I take the time to let a scene develop and evolve until it reveals itself to me. This results in a photograph with visually pleasing composition, providing a sense of balance, sometimes clean, sometimes gritty. Always compelling. I love excluding the expected and including the unexpected, turning a seemingly mundane scene into a thought-provoking image.

Jessica Kaplan Photography
email: jessica@jessicakaplanphoto.com

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The Lisa D Show is a podcast celebrating creatives, featuring 20-minute, unedited conversations that mimic the live-radio vibe, very low tech on purpose. Reach out to host Lisa Degliantoni at thelisadshow[at]gmail.com

Photographer Vanessa Filley on The Lisa D Show

Photographer Vanessa Filley's art tells the stories of today, the past and a future imagined. Storytelling through her photography, Filley builds engaging, inviting and sometimes eerie images with visually compelling collaborators … her children and her friend's children.

In this interview we walk through several of the pieces from her upcoming show “A Nursery Rhyme For You” opening Nov. 4, 5-8 p.m., at Perspective Gallery in Evanston, up thru Nov. 26. If you don’t make it, check out her work online at vanessafilley.squarespace.com

This interview is candid, inviting the listener into Filley’s artistic process and beautiful mind. I am grateful to know artists like this who make Evanston a more interesting and beautiful place to live.

More Info: A Nursery Rhyme For You

As a child some weekends we visited my grandparents in a farmhouse of decaying grandeur in New Jersey and other weekends we’d stay home and traipse through the halls of great New York City museums.  I always imagined how these places could be different, how they were a portal to another time, an imagined life.  In the attic of my grandparents home there were dust covered steamer trunks filled with ballgowns while the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offered a glimpse into the interiors of early American homes. I dreamt of wearing these ballgowns and living in a different era, but despite my dreamy nature I never got much beyond dress-up in shoddy 1970’s halloween costumes.  

As the mother of two girls with fanciful imaginations in an era when unfettered childhood fantasy is interrupted or negated by an abundant access to technology I have sought to preserve and create for my daughters a little bit of the magic I longed to have brought into my own childhood while avoiding much of the contemporary child’s play market and trying to impart an honest sense of the world we live in today.

I find great inspiration in anything from fairytales to the primal relationships between humans and nature to current events. Every fairytale has a dark side, the death of a parent, the loss of a power and in an era of social and political upheaval and environmental degradation, the dreams and fantasy of a child are effected and shaped by the external forces buzzing in the world around them. In A Nursery Rhyme for You My Dear I am attempting to both create a child-like fantasy world and to allow the harshness of reality to seep in.  When I make an image I am very interested in exploring it’s underbelly.  It may look pretty on the outside, but perhaps there is more to it.  I want to both dwell on and delete some of the darkness in any given scenario, to try on a story for size, to understand what it might be like to exist in that moment and how to learn from it, but also leave it behind, as if in a dream.

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The Lisa D Show" is a podcast celebrating creatives, featuring 20-minute, unedited conversations that mimic the live-radio vibe, very low tech on purpose. Reach out to host Lisa Degliantoni at thelisadshow[at]gmail.com

Aimée Beaubien at Platform

Aimée Beaubien's art installation at Platform in Evanston, "Cuttings", recreates a magical garden, inviting the public to tour generations of gardens. The installation features floor to ceiling photos of gardens and plants cut up and woven into shapes and formations, hung with rope, attached to dried lemons and other organic matter. Walking through the installation gives one the feeling of being a tiny lost creature in a magical and fantastical garden.

The public is invited this Saturday, June 3, to meet Aimée at Platform on 904 Sherman Ave., 12-7:30 p.m. Aimée is one of more than 200 visual artists participating the kick off weekend of Evanston Made, a monthlong visual arts celebration in June that turns the city of Evanston into a art gallery. Learn more at evanstonmade.com

Show notes: this interview includes background on Aimée's great grandmother's experience living through the Great Depression, insight into Rugby culture and songs about dog-butt sniffing, the evils of vines and finding your soulmate after 40.

Chicago-based artist Aimée Beaubien constructs optically perplexing arrangements from fragments of her own photographs. See more of her work at aimeebeaubien.com

Platform is a foundation for the unconstrained creative vision of Justine Bianco and Maggie Meiners.  It is our studio with a store front project space to exhibit BIG ideas. We are not a conventional gallery looking to make a buck, we are an exhibition space in which artists have creative license to get adventurous. Learn more at platform904.com

"The Lisa D Show" is a podcast celebrating creatives, featuring 20-minute, unedited conversations that mimic the live-radio vibe, very low tech on purpose.

The Lisa D Show with Jill Birschbach, unedited

Jill Birschbach is the president of the Midwest Clay Guild and a working artist living in Evanston. She has a show at the Evanston Art Center, with an opening reception Feb 5, 1-4 p.m. The show (up thru March 4) features pieces from her Small Monuments Series, a collection of ceramics with photos from Birschbach’s personal collection. They capture the people and atmosphere of her childhood stomping grounds and when combined with ceramics, she explains, further immortalize lifetime memories.

Jill Birschbach’s work explores ideas about time, memory and loss. She originally used photographic images to convey these themes and more recently has been creating ceramic sculpture. With her discovery of ceramic photographic decals she was able to bring together her two interests.

In this interview we talk about several riveting and sexy topics; Jill’s use of her family as the subject in her photography, the emergence of digital photography, the Evanston Art Center and the merit of revisiting ideas many, many years later.

Jill graduated with a BFA from UW-Oshkosh in 1992, and has an MFA in photography from the University of Nebraska. She exhibits her work nationally and has been included in shows at AKAR Gallery in Iowa City, The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, Baltimore Clayworks, Bradley University, Lillstreet Art Center, and Texas Tech University among others (www.jillbirschbach.com). She is a research editor for Getty Images in Chicago and has her studio at the Midwest Clay Guild in Evanston, IL (midwestclayguild.org).

See her work at www.jillbirschbach.com

The Lisa D Show is a podcast celebrates creatives. Listen to 20 minute, unedited conversations with host Lisa D. and the creatives who make our world a more connected, interesting and beautiful place to live. Podcasts will be posted on this blog and on Soundcloud.com

This podcast is recorded at 1100 Florence, an art event space in West Evanston, IL, owned and operated by Lisa Degliantoni and Dave Ford. It is a former Polish Grocery store, probably not the BEST place to record a podcast (boomy to say the least) but we're new and it will get better. Reach out to thelisadshow[at]gmail.com

1.27.10: Blogs I like

Caption: Woman with glasses, January 23, 2010, published on fiveblocksaround.blogspot.com

"ABOUT THIS BLOG

109 N. Mesa (El Paso, Texas) Is the address of the building where I live. I live in a seven story building that houses six loft like apartments and retail stores on the first floor. This blog is about the people, places and things five blocks around this building and sometimes in this building. No more no less."

In addition to being interesting and beautiful, this blog has managed to spark quite a debate on my Facebook page. First take a look at this blog, browse the photos, then read through some of the comments from my Facebook page (Lisa Degliantoni) on this post.

We'll be interviewing the creator of this blog in a few weeks on "The Lisa D Show," but first I want this conversation to gain some traction and make sure that I interview as many people and view points that I can.

1:20:10: Today's Guest

Mark Paulda, author of Celebrating El Paso, will be the guest on "The Lisa D Show" today from 1 - 2 p.m. on KHRO 1150 AM. Tune in or stream the show from www.talkradio1150.com. Call the show @ 915.880.4376.

Celebrating El Paso, published by TCU Press in October 2009, captures the borderland from Mark Paulda's celebrated photographic eye. Paulda, who has been recognized internationally for his photography at the Prix de la Photographie and Venice International Photo Awards, will discuss the book’s success and his next exciting publishing project.

As part of our author series on “The Lisa D Show,” listeners will be given the chance to win a signed copy of Celebrating El Paso following Paulda’s interview.

To see more of Paulda’s work, visit http://www.markpaulda.com/.

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If you're interested in being a guest on "The Lisa D Show" send an email to thelisadshow@gmail.com.