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Patrice Aphrodite Helmar

@patricehelmar

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“Feeling Good About Me,” featured in @artforum Critics’ Picks. Thrilled to see the Arctic Bar featured, and my cousin Nellie. Thank you, @ncmorgan by @patricehelmar

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8 years ago

Current fridge line-up for posterity & a ten pack. Marigold @extraspecialwithcheese in Burlington, Vermont till 3pm today and runs thru July 26th.
2. Editor’s cut in @bombmag thanks for @tmconsidine for getting permission for and including the entire Borges poem. Link in bio ✨
3. @coreyriddell making zines for Marigold @extraspecialwithcheese if you’d like one dm @extraspecialwithcheese or stop by the space in VT
4. Oklahoma City, 2022
5. This could be us, just sayin’
6. Brooklyn, 2025
7. Behind the scenes footage of part of the backyard feast DP @elleperex
8. Spring semester calm down party of one
9. Missing lilac season already
10. Dog show at the @anchoragemuseum thanks to @fdubrock for including iconic Dolly Girl photograph. Maybe the most excited I’ve ever been to be in a group show, all about dogs! taken in Harvard University by @patricehelmar

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a year ago

Thank you @bombmag for making Dolly Girl the cover girl of the Winter 2025 issue - a dream come true. Honored to be in conversation with one of my favorite people and photographers @elleperex and grateful for @tmconsidine and the other editors and crew at Bomb for their care, craft, & consideration in helping to structure this conversation. Thank you to @participantafterdark & @liagangg where this body of work, Polaris, was featured in a solo exhibition this summer. taken in BOMB Magazine by @patricehelmar

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2 years ago

Xavier in his room - October, 2026 taken in Lower East Side by @patricehelmar

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12 days ago

Cassavetes Forever ♾️

“I don’t think a person can live without a philosophy. What is philosophy? ‘Philos’ in Greek means ‘friend’ or ‘love’, ‘love’ and ‘friend’ is synonymous. The study of any ‘ophy’ is the study ‘of’. So it’s the study of love, and to have a philosophy is to know how to love and to know where to put it. Because you can’t put it everywhere you’d walk around; you’d have to be a minister or priest saying ‘yes, my son’ or ‘yes, my daughter’, ‘bless you’. But people don’t live that way; they live with anger and hostility and problems and lack of money . . . tremendous disappointments in their life. So what they need is a philosophy. What I think what everybody needs is a way to say: ‘Where and how can I love, can I be in love, so that I can live. So that I can live with some degree of peace.’ And I guess every picture we have ever done has been in a way to try to find some kind of philosophy for the characters in the film. So that’s why I have a need… for the characters to really analyse love: discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all that stuff, in that war — in that word polemic and picture polemic of what life is. And the rest of the stuff really doesn’t interest me. It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind.

That’s all I’m interested in: is love.”

John Cassavetes, I’m Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes - the Man and His Work (1984)

#cassavetes by @patricehelmar

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15 days ago

Eighteen by @patricehelmar

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18 days ago

C. Scott Fry was a true friend of mine. There are so many stories I’ve been thinking of the last day or so.

He sat patiently in his apartment on Gastineau while he showed me the finger picking on Elizabeth Cotten’s, “Freight Train.”

And for years afterward while working or playing music together we’d share a smile and one of us would say, “here’s another song about mortality.”

Scott was there when I bought my first truck after my dad died. He taught me how to properly light someone’s cigarette at the bar lightly touching their hand and cupping the flame. A stranger would wander in to the dimly lit room and he’d say, “come on in the water’s just fine.”

His legendary way of getting someone out of the bar by bringing them to another “better bar”.

The late nights, early mornings, and day bar. He did the books, booked the bands, fixed the dish washer, gently asked us all to drink anything but whiskey the next month to balance out the deficit, he’d twirl a pretty lady on the janky floor and almost knock over a table or the lady, his impeccable fashion sense, his laugh, the songs he wrote about his life, and all the jokes & stories he told.

He made sure we were alright even when we weren’t & he wasn’t. All of it adds up to a life that was really lived and a man that was loved by most. All the songs he sang, all the people he sang them with, and for.

Love you forever, Carl Scott Fry by @patricehelmar

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a month ago

Grateful to have lived in the world at the same time as Saint Dolly Parton. She wrote honestly and simply about her life. The beauty of it, the complexity of poverty, and the struggle of life and love. Here are some of her earliest songs with a few older ones mixed in near the end. I’m convinced she wrote, “Wildflowers” for me, and that’s what the best artists do. They make some thing so familiar that it begins to be so dear and in a sense belong to us. 💔 link in bio for playlist or comment & I’ll send it to you.

Photo of a 20 year old Dolly during a 1966 recording session in Nashville, Tennessee.

Photo credit: "Courtesy of Dolly Parton" as documented by historical archival collections such as the Country Music Hall of Fame.

#ripdolly #dollyparton by @patricehelmar

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2 months ago

“If the painter is to represent through art the spirit, the soul of his land, Guttuso will be among them because Sicily has a thousand faces and a thousand souls that give charm to things and people. One should no longer think of the external vision of the coasts and mountains at a certain time of day and with a certain light. One must descend into the soul of this contrasting and dramatic land to fully understand the charm it emanates. But to reveal its intimate secrets, one must approach nature with a fresh and renewed spirit to fully feel the hidden harmonies that this great spiritual and transcendental land possesses, the center of myths and legends that clearly distinguishes itself from others in spirit and substance. When the value of Sicily is understood through works and signs left to us in the past, such as the portraits of Antonello and the metopes of Selinunte, one will better comprehend the spirit of the new Sicilian painting and sculpture,” Italian painter and sculptor Pippo Rizzo by @patricehelmar

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3 months ago

Nine dog details from Villa Borghese today (does Cerberus count as three?) and bonus Caravaggio’s twink lover in the 1610 banger, “John the Baptist” probably more accurately depicting a “Good Shepherd”. taken in Villa Borghese by @patricehelmar

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3 months ago

Every time I come home, reuniting with my pal Anya is a highlight. When we first became friends many years and a lifetime ago she would come into the Alaskan and bring me a hand beaded necklace and have a drink after her shift at the Fish. I loved her laughter, beauty, and brightness then. She lit up the barroom. Anya is one of the smartest, kindest, coolest, and most gifted educators and thinkers I know.

Friendship is one of the best parts of life. I’m not sure in what category or hierarchy it lines-up with, but it’s high up there for me: along with books, seltzer, laughter, photography, dogs, stick shift gender neutral trucks, music, people who are easy on the eyes, and jaunty caps.

As the great poet, @frenchmontana once said, “a friend to all is a friend to none.” taken in Áak'w Ḵwáan Territory - Tlingit Country (Juneau, Alaska) by @patricehelmar

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3 months ago

Home town six pack: largest temperate rainforest in North America edition. taken in Áak'w Ḵwáan Territory - Tlingit Country (Juneau, Alaska) by @patricehelmar

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4 months ago