Dr. Evermor's Forevertron & HH Bennett's Studio

I had a very busy spring, and now that it's summer (how'd that happen?), I'll try to take advantage of the holiday weekend to catch up on some blogging.  In June we had a family gathering in the Wisconsin Dells with the obligatory boat rides on the Upper and Lower Dells and a lumberjack breakfast at Paul Bunyan's Cook Shanty.

But the two things I had always wanted to see in the Dells? Dr. Evermor's Forevertron and H.H. Bennett's Photographic Studio!

The Forevertron is an amazing outdoor sculptural environment created by Tom Every a.k.a. Dr. Evermor from salvaged items.


He was doing steampunk before steampunk was cool. I won't even try to describe this in words. You can see my full Flickr set here. We were fortunate to meet him on the day, and the official Dr. Evermor website is up, but still under construction. Besides the Wikipedia article linked above, you can read more at Roadside America and PBS.org.

On a slightly different tack, the H.H. Bennett Studio is small museum run by the Wisconsin Historical Society, which preserves a 19th-century photographic studio. (If you've ever wondered, my on-line name is "vintagepix" because I have a collection of vintage photos.)

So this site might not be for everyone's tastes but I am entertained by giant cameras and stereocard viewers (modeled here by my big brother)

and taking a family photo through the lens of an antique camera.

(For those of you who know your optics, we are upside down in the original photo.) So if you're in central Wisconsin this summer, consider a road trip!

Henry Darger is everywhere!

I will admit that I was unfamiliar with Henry Darger, though I am sure I had seen images of his work before I went to the Messages and Magic show at the Kohler Art Center last week.

Then this weekend I saw Jessica Yu's fascinating documentary Protagonist on our digital cable's "free movies on demand" channel, and had to look her up on IMDb, where I found she had previously made a documentary about Darger, In the Realms of the Unreal. So now I'm waiting to get that DVD through interlibrary loan.

And then in last night's episode of The Simpsons, Lisa and her new best friend visit the Folk Art Museum where you can see Henry Darger's art hanging on a wall in the background, including "Spangled Blengins" (above), which I had just seen at the Kohler. (Lisa also stopped to look at some Joseph Cornell shadow boxes, so I'm sure there are a lot of other real artists represented in that one brief scene, and someone somewhere on the interweb will analyze this is great detail.)

On a side note: Protagonist explores Euripidean dramatic structure through the life stories of four different modern men and is much more riveting than that sounds and also visually interesting because of a Greek chorus of puppets (not as cheesy as it sounds but some reviewers apparently found them distracting) and animated title cards for each section inspired by ancient Greek art. This in turn reminded me of another documentary that I recommend to everyone: Anne Marie Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam. (There's a book too, but the movie came first and is much more fun to watch.)