art current: A Studio Visit with Autumn Cipala

Ceramicist Autumn Cipala creates incredibly delicate vessels that are inspired by ancient porcelains from China, Korea, and Morocco.

http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?
SectionID=50&SubSectionID=72&ArticleID=38600&TM=54587

Portland Phoenix: Rose Marasco at the Portland Museum of Art

Photographer Rose Marasco's first museum retrospective shows off her endless inquisitiveness.
http://portlandphoenix.me/2015/04/29/arts/art/from-invention-to-the-ordinary-five-decades-of-photography-by-rose-marasco/

Portland Phoenix: Michel Droge at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery

The show ranges from large atmospheric abstractions and small cartoonish narratives to darkly moody etchings.

http://portlandphoenix.me/2015/04/15/arts/art/it-all-adds-up-michel-droges-tiny-catastrophes-matter/

 

art current: Bearing Fruit at the Maine Farmland Trust Gallery

A spirited collection of ceramics by Anne Alexander, multi-media objects by Leah Gauthier, photographs by Jacinda Martinez, and fiber art by Julie H. Rose.

http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=72&ArticleID=38055&TM=42151.74

from top: Rose, Martinez, Gauthier, Alexander

Portland Phoenix: Salt, Silver, and Sun: Historic Processes by Photographers Today

This beautiful show at Portland's PhoPa Gallery explores how contemporary photographers use historical processes.

http://portlandphoenix.me/2015/04/01/arts/art/past-and-present-perspectives-contemporary-photographers-click-with-historical-processes/

Kari Wehrs, Alex

 

art current: Recent Acquisitions at the Farnsworth Art Museum

While there are many more recently acquired artworks on view throughout the galleries of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, this review focuses on James Fitzgerald's depictions of Mount Katahdin.
http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=72&ArticleID=37841&TM=39394.37

Portland Phoenix: Karen Kraven at MECA's ICA

 

Canadian Karen Kraven explores the difference between appearance and substance encountered daily.

http://portlandphoenix.me/2015/03/18/arts/art/nothing-is-what-it-seems-karen-kravens-inquiries-into-deception/

art current: The Coast & the Sea - Marine and Maritime Art in America

 

This exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art was organized by the New York Historical Society and has been touring the country.
http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=268&ArticleID=37575

Robert Havell Jr. (United States, born England, 1793-1878), View of Hudson River from Tarrytown Heights, circa 1842, oil on canvas, 22 x 30 inches. New-York Historical Society, Gift of Harry Peck Havell, 1946.179

art current: A Dialogue with David Troup

 

One of the many hats David Troup wears in midcoast Maine is being a company member of the Everyman Repertory Theatre.

http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=72&ArticleID=37132&TM=46710.46

art current: Richard Lee: Paper Trails

 

Richard Lee was passionate about handmade paper.

http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=72&ArticleID=37344&TM=39575.91

art current: 3D Contemporary Works at the Farnsworth Art Museum

 

Rockland's Farnsworth Art Museum has installed a wide range of contemporary sculptures from their permanent collection in one gallery. Artists include Leonard Baskin, John Bisbee, Eric Hopkins, Louise Nevelson, Celeste Roberge, and Brian White.

http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=72&ArticleID=36929&TM=49456.45

above: John Bisbee's Zero; below: Celeste Roberge's Northern Archives: Geographies

art current: A Studio Visit with Warren Seelig

In the basement of Rockland's Syndicate Building, light and airy art comes into being.
http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=72&ArticleID=36720&TM=39076.05

DigPortland: Kyle Bravo at SPACE

New Orleans-based Kyle Bravo plays with space and scale in his site-responsive narrative at Portland's SPACE Gallery.

https://www.digportland.com/feeling-dwarfed/#sthash.xsYVh6gZ.dpbs 

art current: Bernard Langlais at the Colby College Museum of Art

Bernard "Blackie" Langlais (1921-1977) followed his own vision in art and life.

(image courtesy Colby College Museum of Art)
http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=72&ArticleID=36582&TM=36205.55

art current: Joshua Cardoso at Rockland's Win Wilder Hall

 

You have to see these ink drawings in person, up close, to be able to appreciate their fluidity of form. (detail above)

http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=268&ArticleID=36502&TM=54368.42

DigPortland: Pat Corrigan at Mayo Street Arts

Of Mice and Cheese.
https://www.digportland.com/looneyville-is-all-of-us/#sthash.e7o6o4G8.dpbs

Portland Phoenix: Tonee Harbert at PhoPa

 

This, Our Curious World

Tonee Harbert casts an appreciative eye around

The dictionary on my desk defines curiosity as “the desire to learn or know about anything; inquisitiveness” but also as “a curious, rare, or novel thing” and “a strange, curious, or interesting quality.” In its archaic use the word described “carefulness; fastidiousness.” PhoPa Gallery’s “Tonee Harbert: Curiosities” encompasses all those definitions in the images’ driving force, subject, character, and even execution.

Exhibited are sixteen black-and-white archival pigment prints of scanned film negatives that were taken with plastic Diana cameras. The resulting images are slightly distorted, lack sharp focus, and feature strong graininess and evenness of tone. Like a reductive filter, this visual quality acts as a distancing device, highlighting its artifice, spelling it out: you are looking at an image, not the thing itself. This is especially true for the composite dip- and triptychs in which the individual images are conspicuously outlined and not aligned. The three sections comprising Untitled_(Bridge triptych) roughly depict the iron railroad bridge itself and the banks of the river it crosses, which serves as a clear indicator of the meaningfulness and deliberateness of Harbert’s style. Elimination of details make it clear that these images are not after verisimilitude but basic forms and atmospheric moods—the expressive potential of essentials. Even an image of a flying dove appears inexplicably still and quiet; water, sky, and fog become just as solid as the rocks they envelop.

Harbert’s is a careful and consistent vision. His curiosities lie not in extraordinariness or sensational potential. They aren’t tinged by irony either. Instead, they are subtle and evanescent natural occurrences or man-made interventions into nature. Fog nearly conceals a floating crane. Streetlamps and the moon come in the same shape. A plume of smoke rising from a yard fire is strikingly white.

These images are informed by a curiosity that seems free of any angle, anger, or agenda. The images are not so much about the thing itself but about what is/has happened here, like the tree that lost a chunk of its canopy and the bird’s nest perched above water. They are more about an essence or idea than any specific incidence. (Although shooting locations are identified, it is a case in point that they do not really add anything to the experience of the images—it’s not that kind of knowledge that the artist is in pursuit of.) Thus cypresses become the essence of verticality. A seaweed covered rock is all bulk, weight, and slipperiness as it succumbs to the eternal tides. Pierced by rods, this particular boulder seems almost shamanistic or animalistic in character.

At the same time there is an interest in abstract, geometric forms of natural or human origin. Untitled_(Cliff grid) focuses on an incongruous grid hewn into (?) the side of a vertical drop. The aforementioned image, Untitled_(Street lights), plays on the more or less circular shape of light sources. And Untitled_(Barn) highlights the geometry of a barn. Man-made elements are completely integrated into nature, not destroying it. It is thus that the tower positioned at a rocky coastal edge appears particularly solid and stony with its stark edges and surrounded by jagged rocks. Yet it is clearly also fragile within nature, anchored to a base and tied down as it is. A similarly touching vulnerability pervades the image of two bushes wrapped for the winter amidst a barren field. They are hunched over like peasants draped in loose clothes, interacting with each other. I cannot help but think of The Annunciation, imbuing this scene with human, natural, and spiritual drama and mystery.

 

If compassion for this curious world of human and natural interaction can be depicted, these images come very close to it. Perfectly using the imperfections of the medium, Harbert’s images are nonjudgmental, appreciative of what is, not caught up in surfaces. This is a quiet viewing treat, one very much worth spending some time with.

 

art current: Light, Color, and Air at Caldbeck

 

Rockland's Caldbeck Gallery has the perfect antidote to the winter blues on its walls.

http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=268&ArticleID=36183

above: Cicely Aikman - below: Kayla Mohammadi

art current: The Dilemma of Memory

Under the title The Dilemma of Memory, artworks and poems that address the ongoing impact of the Holocaust and other genocides have been gathered at the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine.
http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=72&ArticleID=35980&TM=50845.67




above: Leonard Meiselman, Enigma 2
below: Dorothy Schwartz, Boots

art current: Work by Dyan Berk at Miles

A hospital may not be the likeliest place to see some fresh and energizing work, but that's others' loss - Dyan Berk is showing two-dimensional work of great spirit at the Miles Memorial Hospital in Damariscotta.

http://www.freepressonline.com/main.asp?SectionID=50&SubSectionID=72&ArticleID=35802&TM=40106.2


left: Hiccup
below: Fertile Myrtle