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May Issue 2009
The Mahler in
Raleigh, NC, Features Works by Tift Merritt
The
Mahler in Raleigh, NC, will present the exhibit, Tift Merritt:
Other Countries, featuring an exhibit of photographs by Tift
Merritt, on view from May 1 - 30, 2009.
Songstress, writer, photographer and native North Carolinian Tift Merritt returns home after the release of her lauded album Another Country (Fantasy Records 2008) and a heavy touring schedule to exhibit her first photography show.
These images are the visual component of the record Merritt wrote. In pictures and at the piano, feeling like another country herself, her work held fast to the idea that the distance between people - even just two people - is hard enough to translate that we are all like other countries unto ourselves.
Merritt offers the following about her works, "Taking pictures, at first, was an antidote for traveling too much. My best attempt to slow the pace of changing scenery was at least to mark it. I could get out of sound check all afternoon if I told everyone I was going out to take pictures. That was sometimes the only real look I had at the town where we were playing. I was alone - another touring rarity - and sifting the streets for a small, precise moment felt very much like writing without words."
"While working on Another Country, taking pictures became a part of my writing process," adds Merritt. "I was living alone in Paris, and when I had pushed a song as far as was productive, I would take a walk with my camera. I usually cannot escape the song I am working on; I sleep and wake up in the cadence, I tap the rhythm standing at the refrigerator looking for lunch. The quiet intensity of taking pictures stopped that train of thought. My camera was a very gentle companion for re-entering the world around me. Suddenly, I was making friends with a sad man whose hands were freckled, admiring a woman in a blue hat asleep in the Luxembourg Gardens, speaking with a couple smoking cigarettes in front of a lampshade store. I could never walk slowly enough to take all the pictures I saw. When I got home, I would return to writing by recounting the small details of the pictures I did not take."
For further information
check our NC Commercial Gallery listings, call the gallery at
919/828-6500 or visit (www.themahlerfineart.com).
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