Rock & Shop Vintage Market in Durham@Golden Belt

Rock & Shop brings style, music to Golden Belt

By TINA SIADAK
October 15, 2009

A crystal necklace from Good Girls Studio, Inc. -one of the designers showing on Saturday. 

These days, there’s nothing more new than the old. Vintage design fulfills the ever-expanding, trendy urge to make a bold and unique personal style statement. Collecting a few refurbished jewelry pieces and some recycled designer dresses is the perfect way to create a customized wardrobe on a budget.

And now the chance to cash in on this trend is coming to Durham.

This Saturday, the Rock & Shop Vintage Market will take place in the Cotton Room at Golden Belt. The afternoon-long event features vintage vendors and designers exhibiting and selling their wares to Durham residents. 

Local designers Michelle Smith and Regan Wood organized the market, collecting a curated selection of eco-friendly recycled furniture and fashions from a range of regional vendors. Smith and Wood run an online shop called indieNC that offers similar vintage products. 

“The Rock & Shop Market is indieNC come to life,” Smith said. “The impetus for the event was a silent auction I organized for WXDU featuring live music from the Rosebuds. That was so successful—I really wanted to create another similar local event—and that’s how Rock & Shop was born.” 

One of the vendors coming for Saturday’s event is Kiona van Rhee-Wilson, creator of Lucky Accessories. The brand employs several different design methods to create a diverse collection of accessories. Rhee-Wilson’s use of non-traditional materials makes her jewelry unique, embodying the essence of refurbished vintage.

“I use vintage wallpaper to make necklaces, rings, pendants,” she said.  “I also have a line called Made of Money that uses old coins from all around the world.” 

Although Rhee-Wilson has sold her products at the Rock & Shop Market in Raleigh before, she said she is excited for the new spin the Vintage Market in Durham offers designers.

“The Rock & Shop Vintage Market places more emphasis on the refurbished factor of the products,” she said. “It’s all about that vintage component.”

Smith mentioned that the designers were selected in part because of their ability to take old materials and create something modern and stylish. The Rock & Shop Vintage Market exemplifies the range of creative possibility available from utilizing a variety of recycled and discarded elements.

In addition to the vendor displays, the afternoon will include a live fashion show and performances from two local bands: Lonnie Walker and Mount Weather. The fashion show features eight North Carolinian designers, including Brightleaf Square’s Dolly’s Vintage and the eco-conscious, ornate jewelry of Good Girls Studio, Inc.

Katie Seiz co-styled the fashion show and is also one of Dolly’s two in-house designers. Her line, Vintage Garden, is a collection of earrings and other accessories fashioned from found vintage fabrics and other recycled materials. 

“Dolly’s sells a variety of quirky, fun vintage items. Not only clothes and accessories, but gifts and other objects as well,” Seiz said.

Dolly’s will be presenting five looks in Saturday’s show.

Continuing the theme of independent and local creativity, Lonnie Walker and Mount Weather are both up-and-coming area rock bands. Lonnie Walker began in 2005 as a one-man act and has since grown in both membership and musical maturity. Now a quintet and signed to Raleigh’s Terpsikhore Records, Lonnie Walker has cultivated an original mix of Americana influences with dance rock rhythms.

Mount Weather is another five-piece band based out of Chapel Hill. Their sound is a melodic and airy pop-rock that resonates low-key indie playfulness. Mount Weather will open the line-up at 1:30 p.m., with the fashion show wedged between the two bands’ acts.

The Rock & Shop Vintage Market is a veritable celebration of re-used and refurbished design, complete with beer, a DJ and live performances. More than that, however, the emphasis the event places on sustainability and local business provides yet another example of Durham’s efforts to foster an independent, hip and urban community.

The Rock & Shop Market is Saturday, 1 to 5 p.m. at the Golden Belt arts complex’s Cotton Room on the third floor of Building 2. Admission is $3. For more information, click here.

Duke Chronicle's recess- 10/15/09

Bob Timberlake Exhibit at the American Tobacco Campus

Art takes a backseat at ATC's A Carolina Collection

By TINA SIADAK
October 1, 2009

What happens to art when it is no longer anything but its market? 

The opening of Bob Timberlake’s A Carolina Collection at the American Tobacco Campus did a good job of answering that question. With booze and swanky hors d’oeuvres from Revolution as the centerpiece of the room, Timberlake’s watercolors took a backseat at their own showing. The atmosphere and mood appeared more like a corporate mixer than any art exhibition. Moved to the side to make room for cocktail tables, the paintings had a complete non-presence in the airy space of the Strickland Lobby.

Timberlake is known for his detailed watercolor depictions of the rural South. Picturesque ocean-side landscapes and windowsill still lifes epitomize his work. Timberlake’s evocation of American simplicity endeared his work to the masses and the artist is now a veritable powerhouse of faux-antique products. His sprawling gallery in Blowing Rock, North Carolina sells everything from reproductions and furniture to coffee and sweets.

A Carolina Collection offered nothing new or unexpected from the usual Timberlake repertoire. Multiple watercolors focused on the snowy landscapes of Carolina farm homes or the shanty-like ocean cottages of yesteryear’s Outer Banks. The paintings mainly inspired thoughts of how perfectly they would complete the decor of any quintessential mountain getaway or seaside vacation home.

Timberlake has clearly created a successful niche for himself in the art market. As his design empire continues to expand to include home accessories, souvenirs and toys. One has to wonder, however, how connected Timberlake is to his art today. The opening of A Carolina Collection, where art acted as the mere side plate to good food and small talk, indicated that in the midst of manufacturing, creative purpose has been lost.

-Duke Chronicle's recess 10/1/09

Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction

The name Georgia O’Keeffe solicits a slew of varied responses. Some view the artist with awe and appreciation, while others believe her to be overrated and mundane.

            Personally, O’Keeffe has always been an inspiration as a woman artist who truly understands the emotive power of art, and, more specifically, color.

            Known and popularized for her landscapes and floral paintings, O’Keeffe actually dedicated a large amount of her studies and work to abstraction. The new exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction, at the Whitney Museum in NYC explores this side of O’Keeffe’s artwork.

            The exhibition compounds numerous abstractions from the very start of O’Keeffe’s career to the very end. By creating a timeline of these abstract pieces, the exhibition further tries to confront and explain the controversies that haunted O’Keeffe’s career. For one, the collection includes some of the ultra-magnified, cropped floral paintings that so many guesses to be symbols for the female anatomy. Abstraction acknowledges these opinions and presents O’Keeffe’s frustrated reaction to the public connection of her work with sexual imagery.

            The exhibition also includes Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs of the artist and the background story of their significance to her enormous reputation, as well as the link of her art to female sexuality. In the beginning of their relationship, O’Keeffe posed for Stieglitz in a series of intimate nude photographs. O’Keeffe gained a measure of celebrity from this series and from her controversial affair with the much-her-senior Stieglitz.

            Later O’Keeffe posed for Stieglitz again, but this time posed in a profile of calm dignity: a remade portrait of female independence and confidence. The two series offer an interesting juxtaposition of youth and old age, creating a portfolio of maturing femininity.

            The story on the sidelines of the Abstraction exhibition, however, may point to what is so polarizing about O’Keeffe’s art. As a living legend, it seems O’Keeffe was always fighting the public interpretations of her works, and ultimately of her own persona. Even in the Whitney’s postmortem exhibition, the experience of the art is still irrevocably linked to the story of the artist.

            As for me, I look at O’Keeffe’s work as an exploration of color and shape. I was particularly drawn to the works of the “Eternal Star” series and the “Abstraction: Alexius” piece.

Here is a link to the Whitney website.  

And a write-up of the exhibition in WSJ.