A long card meant to simulate a stereogram brought Karen Tauches and me together. And the Cabbagetown house it depicted in faux antique 3-D style remained a supporting player in our friendship for years thereafter.
Back in 2003, I had been doing the arts calendar for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for a year or so. In those days, I went to Aurora Coffee regularly in search of flyers, postcards, and the like to discover art events and exhibitions that were occurring off the beaten path. Tauches’s promo for The House Project (created with Jenn Brown, among others) distinguished itself at first glance with its precise design. I called her right away for more details, but she gave me the bad news immediately: The installation had been a one-weekend event and was already past. Happily, though, she was willing to walk me through its various works and recreate for me its central performative element, which entailed her mother baking bread behind a scrim in the tiny kitchen at 597 Tennelle Street.
Almost a decade later, when I photo edited the 2012 book Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape, which incorporated images of Tauches’s outdoor Paradise Project, I purposely juxtaposed her picture with a set of stills from a Joan Tysinger video because both showed that corner in Cabbagetown. In retrospect, I realize that I was creating a sly monument to one of the few friendships I can trace to a specific moment at a specific place.
[This clip is an excerpt from the hour-long StoryCorps session.]
BURNAWAY’s audio program is supported in part by Georgia Council for the Arts through the appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. Georgia Council for the Arts also receives support from its partner agency, the National Endowment for the Arts.
This project is supported in part by the Georgia Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities and through appropriations from the Georgia General Assembly.
