C.S.1 Hosts Unique Food and Art Experience at The Fargo House
Buffalo, NY – On Saturday, May 17 2014, CS1 Curatorial Projects will host its next conceptual food and art experience at the Fargo House. This exclusive, one-night event is conceived as a coordinated procession of people and food through the fantastic rooms of Dennis Maher’s art and architectural oasis on Buffalo’s west side. A collaboration between Maher and Chef Colleen Stillwell, the dinner will unfold in stages over the course of the evening. Each guest will experience nine different courses in nine different atmospheres. The ingredients, presentation and taste of each course will resonate with the rooms within which each plate is set. The cycling of guests and culinary delights throughout the house is meant to echo the movements of objects and materials that are continually re-organized within Maher’s own living space. As guests move from “Parlor Play Room” to “Bridge Room” to “Library” to “Wardrobe Room,” the corresponding dishes will allow for senses of taste and smell to be brought into alignment with those of touch, sound, and sight. Participants will metaphorically “consume” the house—its walls, floors, ceilings, furnishings and objects—by simultaneously consuming its culinary equivalents.
The event will last three hours, and will have a progressive start time between 6pm and 8:30pm on Saturday, May 17. Only 50 tickets are available for this VIP event, and can be purchased here, by emailing schnclaire@gmail.com or calling 716.884.3971. Tickets are $200 per person, or $175 by April 22 2014.
About The Fargo House
In 2009 Dennis Maher acquired a house slated for demolition on Fargo Avenue in Buffalo.He has been living in the house and simultaneously transforming it since that time. Excavations have been made into the walls, floors and ceilings in order to intensify the house’s layers. This has been complemented by the continuous accumulation of salvaged materials and artifacts.The house has become a hybrid of post-industrial construction and archaeological dig; its surfaces and spaces are layered communicators that speak of a continuous tension between the patterns of daily living and the instabilities of objects. Within the house, operations of making and unmakingexpose a world that is always on the brink of becoming. In 2010, Maher established The Fargo House as a center for the urban imagination.
New York Times on The Fargo House.
Photo by Ginny Stewart
About Chef Stillwell
Colleen Stillwell is a pastry chef who has recently returned home to launch the Culinary Institute in Niagara Falls and lay the groundwork for opening her own business. A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, California, she worked under world-renowned Chef Stephen Durfee, former pastry chef at the French Laundry. Stillwell went on to cook in Daniel Boulud’s three-Michelin-star restaurant in New York and under pastry chef Richard Capizzi of Lincoln Ristorante. Most recently, she collaborated with Lynne McCabe on the editioned, three-dinner artwork Eat Your Hearts Out: A Sensual Migration Through Buffalos’ Past, Present and Future, culminating in a six-course, five-refrain futurist musing at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fontana Boathouse. Her pastries and chocolates are available by special order at stillcoll2@gmail.com. Stillwell currently teaches at Erie Community College.
Buffalo Spree - At the Table: Colleen Stillwell
About Dennis Maher
Dennis Maher is an artist, architect, and educator. For the past 10 years, his projects have engaged processes of disassembly and reconstitution through drawing, photography, collage and constructions. Maher was selected as the 2012-2013 Artist In Residence at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Exhibitions of his work have also been presented at venues such as Black and White Gallery and Project Space (Brooklyn, NY), Cornell University AAP (Ithaca, NY), Pulse Miami Art Fair, Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Galeria Antoni Pinyol (Reus, Spain), Superfront LA, The Carnegie Center (Covington, KY) and Burchfield Penney Art Center (Buffalo, NY). Maher is a recipient of the NYFA Fellowship (2014), the Real Art Ways STEP UP Award (2011), the Black and White Project Space Prize (2010), a NYSCA Independent Projects Grant (2010), and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2008). His work has been featured in NYTimes, Architectural Review, ARCHDaily, Architect Magazine and on the national radio program Smart City Radio. Maher is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at SUNY, University at Buffalo, where he has taught since 2004.
News on the church Maher just bought at Elmwood and Edward.
About C.S.1 Curatorial Projects
C.S.I was founded by Claire Schneider in 2013 to facilitate creative art projects in unexpected spaces. Debuted at the Echo Art Fair, its focus is on realizing projects that viewers can actively engage, participate, and collaborate in to realize work. Chris Barr’s Meaningful Offers invited fairgoers to barter their services for art. meaningfuloffers.com. Lynne McCabe and Colleen Stillwell’s Eat Your Hearts Out reimagined Buffalo’s Irish and industrial history, its farm-to-table present, and bright future through food and text. C.S.1 is presently commissioning an urban garden with artist Alfonso Volo and landscape designer Matt Dore.A long-time museum curator, Schneider most recently organized the traveling exhibition More Love: Art, Politics, and Sharing since the 1990s, 2013. Previous projects include: Extreme Abstraction and Beyond/In Western New York 2007 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art 1998-2008), Seriously Funny and Architecture + Art: 90 Days Over 100° (Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Senior Curator 2008-2010). A Nashville native, she received degrees in art history from Tufts University (BA) and Williams College (MA). She is a founding Board Member of Urban Roots Community Garden Center in Buffalo, NY.
Buffalo Spree - A painter and curator return