Visual artist Terry Durst, who taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art and Cuyahoga Community College, moved to South Collinwood from Tremont four years ago. The move got him closer to the Waterloo Arts District and to the Beachland Ballroom and Tavern, where he loves to see music, mostly country music or anyone that sounds like Neil Young. When he lived in Tremont, his friends knew to look up his home phone number by searching for Neil Young in the phone book, that's how much Durst believes and associates with the power of music.

So it is no surprise really that his first solo art show in nearly a decade is called The Carter Excavations. And that if you go see the exhibit of enhanced primitive-looking wooden boxes and assemblages at the Arts Collinwood Gallery, a boombox is playing primitive Appalachian-style music by the legendary Carter Family band.

"I made sure all the music is from the original trio of the Carter Family. ...I wanted the pieces to look like what I feel when I listen to their music, that raw, one microphone sound of their recordings," says Durst, who graduated from Kent State University with a BFA in sculpture and film in 1987.

Durst says he always listens to music when he works on his art. The surprising revelation about the distressed-looking pieces of art is that he didn't find most of the weathered wood with the interesting faded colors in an old barn or buried in a junkyard somewhere. No, much of what looks like it must be 50 years old, as old as a Carter Family recording, actually started life as a new piece of wood and Durst worked it into it's weathered look, by banging it and painting it over and over until he got the right look. The detail is amazing with cement pushing through lattice work, you swear must have come from an old demolished house.

"I started out merging found objects but they ended up just looking stuck on something, so I just went and created the look I wanted from scratch," says Durst.

One of the pieces has big scripted letters that say Blue Sky, in remembrance of the drive-in movie theater of that name from his youth growing up in Wadsworth. 

"So many people at the opening (January 8) asked where I found the sign, but I made that. Blue sky is also a reoccuring lyric in many Carter Family songs," Durst explains. "I wanted this show to sort of define my style -- there are so many artists that if you see a piece you just know who did it. I think I've settled on this whole "found object/weathered" look sort of thing."

Terry Durst's The Carter Excavations is up at the Arts Collinwood Gallery until Sat. February 6. And you can find Durst himself working as a doorman at the Beachland when he's not in his art studio making history.