A Dedication to the Fleeting Dance with Making Dept.
An early glimpse at our first gallery show—a reflection on long-term photographic collaboration
For over a decade we have worked with Mary and Joel Schroeder—aka Making Dept.—on documenting Antica Terra: this land, this work, these people.
Through them we’ve understood what collaboration can be; what it means to be witnessed in ways both wildly unknowable and intimately personal. To be seen in ways that feel like looking inside yourself. To find continual renewal and perspective in photographs that remind you why you started.
This season we’re honored to host our first gallery show inside our new Antica Terra Barrel Hall in Amity—spotlighting a selection of Making Dept.’s film photographs.
These images, selected from years and years of archives and so many desktop folders and endless expired 35mm film scans, comprise a small vignette of the work we have been so lucky to have Mary and Joel create on our behalf. Behind every image there is a story, a moment in time seen through their lens.
We’re excited to share an early glimpse at some of the pieces in the show—alongside an excerpt from a longer conversation with Making Dept. that will be available in print form in the coming season.
You both are talented in so many ways; what does “making” mean in your lives as a philosophy and practice?
We’ve always been interested in picking up a variety of tools; same hands, eyes, different media.
We may also be drawn to the unassuming, broad definition that “maker” affords for us to sprawl out under. Although we do know we are artists, there is a lot of weight behind the word that can be perceived as more exclusive than invitational. “Making Department” and “Art Department” have two different feelings to them. Although artists working as the Making Dept. is an agreeable summary, we are also drawn to the idea that a “department” is never really standalone. It’s always part of a bigger whole, or needs others to join in.
This year, we’ve been splitting our time between Portland and Orcas Island, which is where all of our clay making supplies live—and we recently wrapped up some larger ceramics projects that left us with cravings to drag rakes along the beach for our ongoing Sanding Series. We’ve realized we have a lot to say about small things, even just the preferred angle that a specific stem might occupy in the small opening of a vase.
What through lines connect your work here—across capturing people, place, and process in the interdisciplinary mix of mediums that you work with?
‘Humans doing stuff to grapes’ is the most simplified version of winemaking that no one will ever want printed in fancy places. We have all been working with and around the same nature-oriented theme, each using different media to express angles of a shared story.
Antica Terra’s communal devotion to thoughtful stewardship has come through in many forms: in the form of blisters caused by using teeny scissors to cut individual grapes at a poetic pace. It’s come in the form of people wallpapering the vineyard before sunrise to protect it from an unseasonably scorching afternoon. It’s come in the form of cooking over smokey cauldrons, of dyeing fabric with wild lichen. Illustrating through images has been the tool we’ve used most often, but it’s also been hoisting branches to the ceiling, or convincing stained harvest tarps they can also be twenty-foot light sculptures.
It’s landscape art envisioned in an entirely distinct form; a dedication to the fleeting dance of care and attention devoted to trapping juice in a bottle to see what happens over time.
We value experiences of beauty for their sublime offering; a way to lift us out of (or burrow us more deeply inside) the ordinary. Do you have a working definition of beauty?
We find the word beauty can be a bit slippery in meaning or “fitting” into a category, like an additive layer to put on, or an optimized state of being. It is all transient in nature. How long a shutter is open, how many minutes a harvested grape has before it molds, the same hands gathering wrinkles over years while touching the same plants. Does something fall into the beauty category because of its pedigree? Is it beautiful because of what’s not there? These are more questions than answers.
Thank you to Mary and Joel.
All prints were printed in a series of three. Prints are available for sale at $1,500 for horizontal and $2,000 for vertical, including frames. Please inquire via email to rfoster@anticaterra.com.
Follow Making Department’s work on Instagram, or learn more on their website here.