Welcome

Ahoy Matey, and Welcome to REPTIRE, an intermittent ‘ship’s blog’, chronicling the slow rise in the South Easterly skies of Reptire Designs; a studio that designs and crafts always artful, and sometimes useful THINGAMABOBS from old Indian Cucachou, aka ReTired Rubber.

Down Below, Ye shall find a permanent 'flagship post' marking the Maiden Voyage of Reptire Designs.

And below that, in the ‘hull’, can be found more recent posts chronicling the daring new adventures of Reptire Designs, dashed with small bits of whimsy, spotted pickerel, local color, and lizard lore..

In fact, on the right, in pale purple, ye shall find the Captain's Log’s Table of Previous Posts, which ye can peruse by year, month, and title to ye hearts content.

If ye haven't gotchyer sea legs yet, My Pretty, Ye can take a gander at our website at www.reptiredesigns.com, to get a proper Landlubber's Introduction.

Thanks for stopping in, I do hope you enjoy your visit aboard this ship! HARHARHARHAR.......

Sincerely, Travius Von Cohnifus

Captain, Founder, Indentured Servant, Rubber Alligator Wrestlor Extraordinaire a' this here ship.

enter the treadknot

Welcome
On September 26th, 2006, I launched my tire art/design business, Reptire Designs, with a solo exhibition of my artwork in The Green Gallery at The Scrap Exchange Center for Creative Reuse, in Durham, NC. For many reasons, it was a night that I will always remember, and I am grateful to Laxmi (my girlfriend at the time) and Edie (my mother, still) for dutifully documenting while I shmoozed, so that I may now shmare a taste of the evening with anyone who was not able to attend...



On a cool but lively autumn night-before-Center Fest, a stream of friends and curious strangers trickled (like pebbles through a rain stick) through the forest of odds and ends (that roost at night in The Scrap Exchange), out into the warm light of the back savanna, a scene utterly glopped with bizarre rubbery hybrids. Tentative and curious, the visitors craned their necks, nibbled, pecked, stood back, moved in closer. From the walls, glassy mirror eyes gazed back through black unblinking eyelids, while beneath the visitor's feet, in a steamy drainage cistern, a mortal drama unfolded. Primordial forms, with no eyes at all, sat puckered on stoops. A cascade of glittering steal droplets formed a curtain, to which clung a colony of tiny tire knotlettes.

Vito D., a long-time collabator down from the Asheville area, caressed the warming air with his Strange Little Folk music. I bobbed and I flit, and at an increasing clip-someone must have opened the faucet a bit....for soon I was swooning, I just about lost it! As the evening progressed, to my delight and amazement, 'family' from Durham, Chapel Hill, Pittsboro, Hillsboro, Siler City, Asheville, and Fresno all made it! From the Cohn Clan to the Steudel Clan to the CFS Clan; from the WWC Clan to the Duke Ac Pub Clan to the SAF Clan; from the Bike Shop Clan to the Ninth St. Clan to the Scrap Clan... and every one in between, guys, they were all appearing before my stunned, blinking eyes. While I spun and I splayed, Vito now played-CHURNED- up a torrent of gritty ditties; while a staff volunteer (Brandon's a photographer, I swear) whipped up pitchers of Mango Lassies. And The 'Scrap Exchange girls' worked the door, the counter, and the floor, going "cha-CHING!", cha-CHING!","cha-CHING!".!.



By the end of the night, hundreds of friends, acquaintances and had-been-strangers had poured in, poured over the work, and partaken in, what was for me and my art, a monumental communal feast. And on top of it all, I got to place many of my preemies in hands that I love and trust, and in several instances, hands that fit them like gloves. What a privilage to be able to connect with people this way. Heading into the turbid seas of small business, I can confidently say that if I drown tomorrow, I am at least blessed today with the memory of (as Vito later put it) one authentically good Durham night.



Thanks to all of you who were there; in body and/or spirit.





Reclaimed-wood Builder and Reptire Collector Howard Staab enjoying magwi knot at the Scrap Exchange

Reclaimed-wood Builder and Reptire Collector Howard Staab enjoying magwi knot at the Scrap Exchange
I can't think of anything more rewarding for an artist than to see someone interacting with their artwork. Photo by Laxmi Haynes

Sammy and Dannette contemplate

Sammy and Dannette contemplate
Photograph by Laxmi Haynes

Cascade Colony of Knotlets

Cascade Colony of Knotlets
They would go with your jacket, would they not Claire?

Laxmi Resplendent

Laxmi Resplendent

Mavis In The Mist

Mavis In The Mist
Photograph by Laxmi Haynes

Tire Amazement

Tire Amazement
Photograph by Edie Cohn

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Artists Statement for Spiritual Visions Exhibition

ARTISTS STATEMENT: WORKING WITH TIRES
by Travis Cohn
For the Spiritual Visions Exhibition, The Hermitage Museum and Gardens, 2010.

             For me, the leathery, black rubber of an old tire has its own spiritual presence, and in my work, I seek to honor that presence. Imagining the tire turning, over, and over, over so much terrain, I can’t help but think it must become a little bit wise in the process, in this repetitive, constant contact with the road. For me, I guess, tire rubber has become a metaphor for the soul’s experience in the world.
Perhaps it is significant that I started working with tires while I was living in my van in the ‘industrial wasteland’ of W. Oakland, while teaching health and urban gardening, through Americorps, in the grade school’s there. It felt like a tumultuous moment in history; the attacks of 9-11 had just rocked the foundations of the western way of being in the world, and closer to ‘home’, that year there was both a state take over of the Oakland School System, as well as a federal slap-down style take over of the traditionally grassroots-led Americorps program. Massive monoliths seemed to be shifting all around us, and my job seemed to be to protect the tiny tender worts and mosses, growing in the cracks between empires. Have you ever scraped your knee on the pavement, and had to dig the pebbles and asphalt out of your flesh? At night, after work, I would often retire to my van, and spend the night mentally picking pebbles out of my soul; images from the day swimming forward; a young African American student, beaming, seemingly unaware of the telltale yellow pollen dusting her nose. Looking back, I wonder if it was this particularly gritty contact with ‘the road’ that led me to connect with these tires.
            To give voice to, and explore some of these feelings that I project onto this material, I have taken these road worn tires to ‘the mat’, and reworked them. I have wrestled them, bent them, twisted them, tied them, turned them, burned them, chopped them, sliced them, punctured them, carved them, and gently coerced them. And finally I have reconfigured them into (among other objects) a form, which I feel finally does the tires justice, and which I personally find endlessly sublime and transfixing…
            I call this form a ‘treadknot’. It is composed of a single strand of worn tire rubber, which weaves and winds, serpent-like, endlessly over and under itself, struggling with it self, tying itself in a knot, and in this process, ultimately re-finding itself. And the result of this weaving and rejoining of ends, is that this single strand creates not only a knot, but, in so doing, also a vessel, capable of carrying another object, in the empty and still space at it’s center. (Elemental, single-celled, primordial basketry, if you will). Like the ouroboros (or snake swallowing its own tail, of ancient and classical mythology) the treadknot is a form that, in its winding, searching and struggling way, evokes, for me, the arduous, but rewarding process of self-regeneration. This is what I have brought to the tires, or perhaps, more accurately, the place where they have brought, and continue to bring me to.
  I would very much like for my tire artwork to be included as a part of Spiritual Visions. Why? Because in this work, I seek to bring forth the tires’ road worn beauty and wisdom. I believe that its inclusion in the show would honor this work, as well as the tires that are both this work’s material and its subject, its means and its end, its journey and its destination.