Come visit the office of Durham Central Market, a new neighborhood cooperative grocery, aiming to locate in the heart of Durham, eat snacks, enjoy drinks, and view a fantastic photography series by local artist – Dawn Dreyer! This will be our last showing with third friday until 2011... so don't miss it!

PopPop’s Garden: Starring Three Plum Tomatoes in Unusual Circumstances

In the Fall of 2007, I had just started a nine-month long artist residency at Pendle Hill, a Quaker center for study and contemplation. On my birthday, just a few weeks into the term, I received a digital camera from my parents. It was mid-October, and the season for the large organic garden waned, but it was still rich with life. The camera had a macro lens, which I had never experimented with before. I stepped into the tomato plants, amazed at how close I could get and still capture a focused image. I tasted the plum tomatoes that had fallen to the ground, still warm from the sun, wiping them on my shirt before popping them in my mouth. I smelled the garden — tomatoes growing nearby basil and the rich dark brown dirt. In manic rush of my previous life in Durham, I had lost touch – literally, lost touch, as well as seeing, listening, smelling, and tasting. Or if I had not lost them completely, I was used to moving so fast and so often existing only in my mind that I had forgotten that this kind of lush experience was even possible. The smells of the garden in particular reminded me of my PopPop's (grandfather's) garden, and the way that his tomato plants would tower over me when I was little.

People often say that a camera places a kind of distance between the photographer and her subject. My experience that day was completely the opposite. It brought me in, moved me closer, into the vines and the leaves and the fruit. Walking away, I held three plum tomatoes in my hand, placed them down on a park green bench, and took a picture. I liked it, the contrast of the colors, the way the straight lines of the wood looked against the roundness of the tomatoes. I spent hours walking and placing the three plum tomatoes against different shapes and forms. With my documentary artist’s sensibility, I didn’t make any changes to each scene except to place the tomatoes. I played for hours, observing light, color, and shape. The photographs in this exhibit are the fruit of that day.

Dawn K. Dreyer is a writer and community based mixed-media artist, working in photography, audio and clay sculpture. She finds inspiration daily in in the amazing creativity and wonderous energy of the two and three years olds at Durham Community Preschool (DCP), where she is a teacher. Her work has been seen at the Durham Arts Council and the Pendle Hill Art Gallery, and heard on WUNC-TV and in exhibitions at the Center for Documentary Studies. She is interested in exploring the connections between creativity, spirituality, and social justice work. Prior to her time at DCP, Dawn spent seven years working at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University directing adult community educational programs and also served for five years as the founding board chair of the Southern Documentary Fund. She recently opened her company, Cracked Window Studios and works with documentary artists to find funding and develop community outreach strategies for their projects, in order to use their work to advance important dialogue around social justice issues.

www.durhamcentralmarket.org