WANAFOTO: Rockland

Showing posts with label Rockland. Show all posts

01/08/25

Stephen Pace @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland - "A Lifetime in Paint" Exhibition

Stephen Pace

A Lifetime in Paint

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

August 1 - 30, 2025

Stephen Pace

A Lifetime in Paint

Oils and Watercolors 1948-2004

Essay by Carl Little

Dowling Walsh Gallery, 2025

Throughout his long and productive career, STEPHEN PACE (1918-2010) made significant contributions to American painting as a prominent member of the New York School, known for his forceful abstract expressionist paintings and later luminous representational paintings and watercolors, which were inspired in large part by his home and surroundings in Stonington, Maine. As art critic and writer Carl Little notes in the exhibition catalog, "From humble beginnings in the Midwest to the artistic hotbed of Abstract Expressionism in New York City to the working waterfront of his Maine home, this artist carried a lifetime's worth of commitment to paint."

Born in Charleston, Missouri, in 1918, Stephen Pace began his art studies at age 17 with WPA artist Robert Lahr in Evansville, Indiana. After serving in World War II, he continued his studies on the GI Bill at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he met Milton Avery, who became a lifelong friend and mentor. The two artists shared a kinship in outlook, an economy of color, line, and form, as well as an involvement in art as a way of life.

In 1953, Stephen Pace made his first trip to Maine, traveling down the coast to the small fishing village of Stonington on Deer Isle, which would become his longtime summer home. In 2007, Stephen Pace bequeathed his house and studio in Stonington to the Maine College of Art & Design as an artist residency to ensure its continued use as an artistic haven and inspiration for future generations.

Featuring more than two dozen oil paintings and watercolors, Stephen Pace: A Lifetime in Paint includes prime examples of the artist's abstract expressionist canvases and favorite recurring motifs—sunflowers, the working waterfront, horses, the figure in the landscape, and the lily pond near his Stonington home.

Celebrated for his radiant use of color and agility in distilling the essence of a subject in succinct and telling strokes, Stephen Pace's work has been the subject of over 85 solo exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the United States. It is represented in over 50 museum collections, and the subject of the monograph Stephen Pace (Hudson Hills, 2004), with text by art historian Martica Sawin.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

357 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

17/07/25

2025 CMCA Biennial Artists Exhibition - Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland

2025 CMCA Biennial Artists Exhibition

Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland

October 4, 2025 - January 12, 2026

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) announces that 29 artists have been selected to participate in its 2025 Biennial. The exhibition will be installed across all 5,500 square feet of the museum’s galleries and be on view from October 4, 2025 to January 12, 2026. CMCA’s Biennial is the longest-running statewide juried exhibition in Maine and highlights the latest developments in contemporary art by Maine-based and connected artists. The 29 artists were selected from an applicant pool of over 450 artists by distinguished jurors Tom Keyes, Keith Fox, and William Hathaway. A free opening reception will take place on Saturday, October 4 from 3-5 pm.

2025 CMCA Biennial Artists: Meg Alexander, Steve Bartlett, Jennifer Brou, Kristy Cavaretta, Thomas Connolly, Sarah Faragher, Gabriel Frey, Grace Hager, Sarah Haskell, Emma John, Mark Johnson, Alice Jones, Dustan Knight, Ben Levine, Kathryn Lynch, Janice Moore, James Mullen, Winslow Myers, Colin Page, Mallie Pratt, Alison Rector, LJ Roberts, David Row, Carol Shutt, Gail Spaien, Sarah Szwajkos, Kathy Weinberg, Ellen Weitkamp, David Wilson

CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART

21 Winter Street, Rockland, Maine, 04841

www.cmcanow.org

22/06/25

Artist Will Barnet @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland - "Correspondence" Exhibition

Will Barnet: Correspondence

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

July 5 - 26, 2025

WILL BARNET (1911-2012)

The Spokane Yellow Cloud, 2003

Oil on canvas, 46" x 32"

Courtesy of Dowling Walsh Gallery

WILL BARNET (1911-2012)

Lightning, 2008

Oil on canvas, 40" x 28"

Courtesy of Dowling Walsh Gallery

WILL BARNET (1911-2012)

Joyous, 2006

Oil on canvas, 32-1/2" x 24-1/2"

Courtesy of Dowling Walsh Gallery

Dowling Walsh Gallery presents Will Barnet: Correspondence, an exhibition of the renowned artist's lesser-known abstract works. The exhibition will be on view in the gallery's newly renovated building at 357 Main Street in Rockland from July 5 to July 26, 2025, with a public reception scheduled for Friday, July 11, from 4:00 to 6:00 pm.

Widely known and internationally respected as a figurative painter and printmaker, WILL BARNET (1911-2012), worked abstractly in the early and late decades of his career. The exhibition, Will Barnet: Correspondence, brings together a selection of the artist's intimate, abstract works on paper from the 1950s, many of which were created on envelopes and postcards, with richly colored and imagined abstract paintings made in the years leading up to his death at the age of 101 in 2012. As Christopher B. Crosman writes in the exhibition catalog, "Barnet liked clarity, concision, and balance—correspondences, if you will, that could carry both representation and abstraction."

A native of Beverly, Massachusetts, Will Barnet had one of the longest and most distinguished careers in American art. His work is in the collections of over 200 museums worldwide and has been the subject of more than eighty solo exhibitions. A highly respected teacher, Barnet taught for more than forty years at the Art Students League in New York City, as well as at other institutions, including Cooper Union, Cornell University, Yale University, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

He first visited Maine in the late 1950s and returned nearly every summer after. First to Chamberlain on the Pemaquid Peninsula and later to Rock Gardens Inn, a group of charming historic cottages in Sebasco Estates, then owned by his daughter Ona. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he didn't hesitate in his reply: "To create timeless art has always been my great ambition, to add another chapter to what came before, another notch in the history of painting."

In the final decade of his life, Will Barnet revisited ideas he was exploring in his abstract work from the 1950s. "Now I'm working with abstract ideas again, but differently," he said in an interview in 2009, "much more playful and open. Instead of the forms edging in on one another in a monumental way, the forms are opening up—they're much more musical."

Reviewing an exhibition of the artist's late abstract paintings in 2010, NYTimes art critic Roberta Smith wrote, "This just in: At the imposing age of 99, the accomplished American painter Will Barnet has returned to abstraction, with excellent results…the paintings themselves are remarkably fresh in every way: the loosely locked-in compositions, stroke-by-stroke layering of colors and balance of restraint and flair. Mr. Barnet offers inspiring proof that it is never too late to sprout new leaves on painting, a tree that accommodates perpetual growth and renewal."

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

357 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

03/10/24

David Vickery @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

David Vickery

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

October 4 – 26, 2024

DAVID VICKERY makes carefully composed, exquisitely crafted paintings that arrest the eye, that draw our attention to the particular within the every day—a bit of sky and dark evergreens reflected in an oblique window, a network of leafless trees casting their shadows against white clapboards, the warm glow of a lit interior framed within the crisp geometry of a grey house—the transitory nature of light and places where the natural and man-made connect. His subjects are primarily drawn from his immediate environment, the landscape, and local villages near his studio in Cushing, Maine, and from his annual trips to Monhegan Island. The images are built up slowly in several thin layers of oil and varnish, a deliberate, contemplative process that lends a meditative quality to the finished, highly detailed paintings.

DAVID VICKERY received his B.A. from the College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor, ME. His work is in the Farnsworth Art Museum's collection, as well as many private and corporate collections throughout the United States. It has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Maine, New York, and Boston, including at Courthouse Gallery, Ellsworth, ME; Sherry French Gallery, New York, NY; Beth Urdang Gallery, Boston, MA; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME; and the Farnsworth Art Museum. In 1993, he was an artist-in-resident at Carina House, Monhegan Island, ME. David Vickery’s work is included in the books Paintings Of New England (Carl Little/Arnold Skolnick, 1996), Art of Monhegan Island (Carl Little/Arnold Skolnick, 2004), and Art of Penobscot Bay (Carl Little/David Little, 2023). He lives and works in Cushing, ME.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

17/06/24

Artist James Allister Sprang @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, Maine - "Each of Us Are Several" Exhibition

James Allister Sprang

Each of Us Are Several

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

July 5 – August 24, 2024

James Allister Sprang

Sunset Ripple (detail), 2023

Woven cyanotypes, textile hardener,

uv-resistant lacquer, wood, 27" x 18"

Dowling Walsh Gallery presents Each of Us Are Several,a solo exhibition of work by artist James Allister Sprang.

James Allister Sprang is a multidisciplinary artist who creates immersive audiovisual installations and complex woven two-dimensional works. "I make sensory poems for the spirit," he says. Similarly to how he weaves genre and instrumentation together when composing and producing musical scores, he weaves prints and watercolor into dimensional, textural works of abstraction that celebrate the sensory experience of Black life. His first exhibition with Dowling Walsh Gallery, Each of Us Are Several is a multimedia installation that includes sound, elements of text, and wall-based work. In its varied forms, James Allister Sprang's work fosters connections between the tangible and intangible nature of being human in this ever-spinning world, between past and present, the known and the unknowable.

JAMES ALLISTER SPRANG was born in Miami, FL, and received his BFA from The Cooper Union, New York, NY, and his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. He is a 2022 Knight Foundation Art + Tech Fellow, a 2023 Pew Fellow, and a 2024 Young Arts Fellow. He has been an artist-in-residence at The Kitchen, New York, NY; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine, Philadelphia, PA; Baryshnikov Arts Center Space, New York, NY; and the Fountainhead, Miami, FL. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the ICA at Maine College of Art and Design, Portland, ME; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Knockdown Center, New York, NY; and The Cooper Union, New York, NY, as well as in group exhibitions throughout the United States, including at the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle, WA; Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami, FL, and David Nolan Gallery, New York, NY. His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and Art Papers, among others. He lives and works in Portland, ME.

Also on view at Dowling Walsh Gallery:

Jenny Brillhart, July 5 – 27, 2024

Bo Bartlett, July 5 – 27, 2024

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

15/06/24

Bo Bartlett @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, Maine - "Saudade" Exhibition

Bo Bartlett: Saudade

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

July 5 – 27, 2024

BO BARLETT

The Cove, 2022

Oil on linen, 80" x 100"

Dowling Walsh Gallery presents Saudade,a solo exhibition of work by painter Bo Barlett.

Artist Bo Bartlett is highly regarded as a painter of contemporary realism. He paints grand human narratives and quiet private moments. His art is an act of discovery, a testament to living close to nature, and a record of the unsettled present. "The purpose of art is to wake us up," he says. In the exhibition, Saudade, a Portuguese word meaning a melancholy yearning, several paintings and pastel drawings depict figures poised on the edge between land and water, a liminal space of repose and unease, reflecting the uncertain nature of our time. Cinematic in scope and grounded in the figurative tradition, Bartlett's paintings speak to his training as a filmmaker and to the work of his mentor, Andrew Wyeth, as well as his artistic forebears, the American realist painters Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singleton Copley, and Benjamin West.

BO BARTLETT received his Certificate of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a Certificate of Filmmaking from New York University. In 2023, he received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Art from the New York Academy of Art and an honorary Certificate from the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at MOCA Jacksonville, Jacksonville, FL; Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, Old Lyme, CT; The Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus, GA; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT; The Florence Academy of Art, Jersey City, NJ; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; and the Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL. Additionally, it has been included in numerous group exhibitions at museums throughout the United States and in Linz, Austria. Bartlett's work is in the collections of the Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, GA; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR; Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO; Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, PA; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; La Salle University Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, FL; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA, among others. He lives and works in Columbus, GA, and Wheaton Island, ME.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

13/06/24

Artist Jenny Brillhart @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, Maine - "Memoir 15" Exhibition

Jenny Brillhart: Memoir 15

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

July 5 – 27, 2024

Jenny Brillhart

Bed and Window, 2024

Oil on panel, 20" x 20"

Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland presents Memoir 15,a solo exhibition of paintings by artist Jenny Brillhart.

Jenny Brillhart finds subjects for her exquisitely rendered paintings in unexpected and often overlooked places, materials and scenes plucked from everyday life that arrest her attention. Photographed and assembled in collages or made into three-dimensional arrangements in the studio, the commonplace become subjects for her spare, elegant compositions. Painted in mostly muted tones with considered notes of color, light and shadows play a dominant role, lending an atmosphere of stillness and calm to her work. The influence of Shaker design and craftsmanship runs deep, as do the Precisionist paintings of Charles Scheeler. Her masterly mark-making defines shape, space, and gravity.

Jenny Brillhart received her BFA from Smith College, Northampton, MA, and MFA in painting from The New York Academy of Art, with additional studies at The Art Students League, New York, NY. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Kuckei + Kuckei Gallery, Berlin, Germany; Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami, FL; and numerous other solo and group exhibitions throughout Maine, Florida, Germany, and Spain. In 2019, Jenny Brillhart's work was included in the New England Biennial Exhibition at the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, and in 2017, in the two-person exhibition Temporality: Jenny Brillhart & Sara Stites at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. She lives and works in Blue Hill, ME.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

23/04/24

Artist Donald Moffett @ CMCA Rockland, Maine - Center for Maine Contemporary Art - "Donald Moffett: Nature Cult, Seeded" Exhibition

DONALD MOFFETT

NATURE CULT, SEEDED

Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland

May 25 - September 8, 2024

DONALD MOFFETT

Lot 110123 (nature cult, houses), 2023

Wood, acrylic, steel

56 1⁄4 x 43 1⁄2 x 36 inches

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) in Rockland, Maine, presents the exhibition DONALD MOFFETT: NATURE CULT, SEEDED. The show, curated by former CMCA director and chief curator Suzette McAvoy, is the artist’s first exhibition in Maine, where he is a seasonal resident of North Haven Island.

Donald Moffett (b. 1955, San Antonio, TX) emerged as both an artist and activist in the late 1980s, participating in ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), as a founding member of the collective Gran Fury, and as a founding partner of BUREAU, a trans-disciplinary studio. Taking abstraction and the monochrome as evolving unfinished languages, Moffett challenges the traditional flat frame of painting through non-traditional techniques and employs new forms that serve as carriers of both personal and political meaning. Currently, Moffett is pursuing NATURE CULT, a deep study and expanding practice of how art and the environmental crisis might collide. “The intensity of a cult is called for as we turn our attention to nature and its preservation,” says the artist.

NATURE CULT, SEEDED is the latest iteration in the ongoing series. The exhibition is centered on the large-scale sculptural installation, Lot 030323/24 (the golden bough), an assemblage of dead tree limbs painted gold and bolted together to form an undead yet ethereal totem to life. In a recent interview with fellow North Haven resident architect Toshiko Mori in Domus magazine, Moffett speaks of his interest in “the tree, the fundamental unit of a forest and the web of ecology that builds out from the tree. When you mess with the tree, a system can fall apart.”

Other works in the exhibition are new wall-mounted and freestanding sculptures incorporating the form of weathered birdhouses punctured and perforated and painted in intense hues. Also included is a selection of the artist’s emblematic shaped and carved panel paintings finished in luminous epoxy resin or given a lush pelt of extruded paint, referencing various organic and bodily forms. Throughout the exhibition, the haunting sound of the now-extinct male Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird can be heard calling for a mate that will never come. At once ominous and seductive, DONALD MOFFETT: NATURE CULT, SEEDED is a clarion call to the precariousness of our planet in crisis. “I don’t think there are issues more important than nature and its health,” says the artist.

DONALD MOFFETT

Donald Moffett’s diverse and formally innovative practice includes painting, sculpture, installation, photography, drawing, prints, and video. His work is included in over thirty public collections, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, among others. Moffett has had solo exhibitions across the United States and internationally, including a major survey exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX, which traveled to the Tang Museum at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, and The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA.

His work has been included in important group shows such as Greater New York at MoMA PS1, New York, NY; America is Hard to See at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; and ICA Collection: Expanding the Field of Painting at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, MA. In 2022, his work was featured in the exhibition DONALD MOFFETT + NATURE CULT + THE McNAY at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX. Moffett is a member of the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, and New York, NY, and the National Leadership Council of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, TX. He is represented by Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, NY, and Aspen, CO, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley, CA. Donald Moffett divides his time between Maine, Texas, and New York City.

CMCA - Center for Maine Contemporary Art

21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME 04841

cmcanow.org

02/03/24

Let the World In Exhibition @ CMCA, Rockland, Maine - Center for Maine Contemporary Art - Curated by Tessa Greene O’Brien

Let the World In

CMCA, Rockland, Maine

Through May 5, 2024

Diana Cherbuliez

Homemaker (6), 2017

Worn-out Carhartt work pants, thread

8 ½ x 12 ⅜ inch

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) presents Let the World In, an exhibition featuring seven artists who collectively explore the themes of openness, observation, and material integration. Guest curated by Maine artist Tessa Greene O’Brien, the exhibition is on view at CMCA through May 5, 2024.

The exhibition title, Let the World In, not only captures the essence of the exhibition but also pays homage to the eponymous National Gallery of Art exhibition in Washington, D.C., featuring Robert Rauschenberg's groundbreaking prints from the 1960s. At that time, Rauschenberg challenged the prevailing abstract expressionism by incorporating recognizable imagery and everyday materials into his art, a sentiment echoed in the diverse works on display at CMCA.

Through a variety of artistic approaches, the featured artists—Sachiko Akiyama, Wilder Alison, Leon Benn, Jordan Carey, Diana Cherbuliez, Carol Eisenberg, and Hong Hong—invite viewers to explore their interconnected existences and the interdependence of humanity. Rather than conforming to strict artistic categories, these creators break free from traditional boundaries to produce work that is both tactile and alluring.

Guest curator Tessa Greene O’Brien emphasizes the contemporary relevance of the artists' work, noting, “Awareness of social unrest carries through the work of these artists, whose work is imbued with their lived experiences & identities. Let the World In serves as a plea and a rallying call, a reminder that all of our existences are intertwined. We are interdependent as a species, and no human is an island.”

About the Artists:

Wilder Alison: Harmonic abstract paintings using cut, sewn & dyed wool, embedding queer theory into the act of dividing and combining.

Sachiko Akiyama: Utilizes wood, resin, and paper mache to present personal and symbolic subject matter, creating mysterious and familiar arrangements.

Leon Benn: Observes and paints surroundings, psychedelically reinterpreting them in reverberating color.

Jordan Carey: Stretches tissue paper over hand-built wooden kite forms, creating painterly depictions of the Bermudian landscape.

Diana Cherbuliez: Translates photographs of her home's construction into embroidered and appliquéd quilt squares, using well-worn Carhartts.

Carol Eisenberg: Creates fantastical color field imagery by digitally layering and manipulating photographic fragments of leaves and flowers.

Hong Hong: Initiates paper pulp paintings in giant outdoor baths, allowing dust, leaves, and airborne sediments to integrate into the finished works.

CMCA - CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART

21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME 04841

cmcanow.org

22/09/23

Joanna Logue @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

Joanna Logue

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

October 6 - 28, 2023

Joanna Logue

Bullrushes, 2022

Oil on cradled birch panel, 16" x 20"

Joanna Logue

Lily Pond, 2022

Oil on linen, 20" x 24-1/2"

Dowling Walsh Gallery presents solo exhibition of new work by artist JOANNA LOGUE.

Joanna Logue paints richly textured, color-saturated paintings of the Maine landscape. She moved to the state from her native Australia in 2017, settling in a small village on Mount Desert. In this relatively short time, Logue has come to know the island landscape intimately through her extensive hikes into the hidden corners of its woods, marshes, and mountains. Like John Marin and John Walker, two artists she admires, her paintings balance on the knife edge between abstraction and representation. Nature is presented close-up, encompassing and challenging, reflecting the changing light and colors of the seasons. She says, "My paintings need to be tough and innovative but soft and seductive at the same time." Using various painting tools to animate each area of the composition, she extends the image beyond its edges—a reminder that we are seeing just a piece of the much larger whole.

Joanna Logue was born in the Hunter Valley in North South West Australia and graduated from the City Art Institute in Sydney with a BA in Visual Arts and a Graduate Diploma in Painting. She has had twenty-two solo exhibitions and has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and internationally. Logue received the Country Energy Prize for Landscape Painting in 2006 and the Central West Regional Artist Award in 2009. In 2014, she was awarded a residency in Bruny Island, Tasmania. Her work is in significant corporate, private, and public collections. Joanna Logue works on Mount Desert Island in Maine and from her Essington Park, Australia studio.

This exhibition is debut presentation for Joanna Logue at Dowling Walsh Gallery.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

20/09/23

Rachel Gloria Adams @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

Rachel Gloria Adams

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

October 6 - 28, 2023

Rachel Gloria Adams

Night Swim, 2022

Cotton and linen, 24" x 24"

Rachel Gloria Adams

Night Swim 2, 2022

Cotton and linen, 24" x 24"

Dowling Walsh Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new work by artist RACHEL GLORIA ADAMS.

Rachel Gloria Adams is a multi-disciplinary artist who works across mediums, creating paintings, murals, quilts, and graphic and textile designs. She brings a passion for dynamic color combinations and bold, clear patterns to all her work. The striking abstract compositions of her recent pieced and sewn textile works honor the celebrated quilts of the women of Gee's Bend, Alabama. For the artist, “they serve as a way of piecing together memories within an heirloom framework.” Her latest paintings draw inspiration from the Maine landscape, combining the beauty of plant forms with the color and movement of the ocean.

Rachel Gloria Adams received her BFA from Maine College of Art in 2015. She has shown her work in exhibitions throughout Maine, including the 2023 Biennial Exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. In 2022, Adams received a David C. Driskell Fellowship and Black Seed Studio Residency at Indigo Arts Alliance. She has also attended residencies at Speedwell Projects and the Stephen Pace House. In addition to her studio practice, Adams maintains a textile design business, TACHEE, and with her husband, artist Ryan Adams, has created numerous public art murals, including a recent large-scale commission for the Farnsworth Art Museum. She lives in Portland, where she serves as a board member for Space Gallery.

This exhibition is debut presentation for Rachel Gloria Adams at Dowling Walsh Gallery.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

08/09/23

Erik Weisenburger (1968-2023) @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland - A Tribute

Erik Weisenburger (1968-2023)

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

September 1 - 30, 2023

ERIK WEISENBURGER paints the natural world as a place of mystery and beauty. His precisely crafted images resonate with intricate detail and a sense of wonder, reflecting his interests in folk tales, myths, and history. His exquisitely rendered scenes are created using a painting method developed by the early Northern European masters that imparts an internal glow to the finished compositions. After preparing a wood panel with layers of gesso and sanding it smooth, the subject is sketched in, and the image is built up through multiple layers of thinned oil paint and varnish to achieve a satiny, lustrous finish. Erik Weisenburger has said this method "best allows me to explore and interpret the mingling of memories, monuments, permanence, and impermanence." A recent painting, Red Shirt, is a pastel-hued landscape, sparsely populated by bare-limbed trees and tiny conifers. A hush falls over the vast space, the only human presence appearing in the lone cabin with laundry on the line. In Erik Weisenburger’s painted world, nature persists in its timeless splendor.

Erik Weisenburger (1968-2023) spent many years living and working in Chicago before moving to South Portland, Maine, in 2005. He studied at the Parsons School of Design in Paris and earned his BFA in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work is in the permanent collections of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Racine Art Museum, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, including the Perimeter Gallery, Chicago; Dean Jensen Gallery, Milwaukee; the Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan; the Wright Museum of Art at Beloit College, and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland.

The planned exhibition of Erik Weisenburger’s work, organized in collaboration with the artist, opened as scheduled at Dowling Walsh Gallery with the support of his family as a tribute to his life and work.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

22/07/23

Elizabeth Fox @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland - Goddess In A Bubble Jacket

Elizabeth Fox

Goddess In A Bubble Jacket

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

August 4 - 26, 2023

Elizabeth Fox

Crossing, 2023

Oil on panel, 20" x 26"

Elizabeth Fox

Egg Hunt, 2022

Oil on panel, 16" x 18"

The exhibition Elizabeth Fox: Goddess In A Bubble Jacket presents new work by painter Elizabeth Fox, who lives in Standish, Maine. ELIZABETH FOX is widely known for her carefully crafted paintings, whose tender colors and precisely drawn subjects belie their sly, dark humor. She works in an exacting, traditional method that connects her work to the early Renaissance masters. The pristine surfaces of her paintings are achieved by applying multiple thin layers of oil paint over a detailed black-and-white underpainting. Each layer is allowed to dry before adding the next, slowly building the image with each successive layer. Embracing “the beautiful and the mundane,” Elizabeth Fox’s meticulously constructed images reference Pop culture, art history, and the mysteries of everyday life. Populated by figures engaged in action and full of personality, her narratives are open-ended, allowing their interpretation to change over time. Each scene is caught in a frozen moment, a “cut” from a fantastical film of life. "By emphasizing the relationships between people, objects, color, and space, everyday scenes can become mysterious, funny, or strange,” she says.

ELIZABETH FOX was born in Orlando, Florida, and attended the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota. She lived in New Orleans for eighteen years before moving to Maine in 2008. Elizabeth Fox has exhibited her work widely at galleries across the United States and the Netherlands. She has had twelve solo exhibitions, including Played to Win at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in 2014.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

Cig Harvey @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland - FEAST

Cig Harvey: FEAST

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

August 4 - 26, 2023

Cig Harvey

The Red Cake, 2023

Photograph on aluminum, 40" x 30"

Cig Harvey

The Banquet, 2023

Photograph on aluminum, 30" x 40"

The exhibition Cig Harvey: FEAST, is an immersive installation by the highly regarded photographer and writer CIG HARVEY, whose work urges the viewer to find and celebrate the beauty in the everyday. “I want people to see my work and seek more joy…because tomorrow will be different. Time is the only currency,” says the artist. Cig Harvey’s art is rich in implied narrative and deeply rooted in her environment. Nature, familial relationships, and domestic life inform her subjects. She describes FEAST as “a maximalist affair involving photographs, installation, audio, neon, and text. Something for all the senses.” Included are photographs of cakes from her most recent body of work. Lavish, extravagant cakes made by her daughter, Scout, as taught by a treasured family friend. Cig Harvey says, “I am fascinated by the rituals surrounding cakes. How entrenched they are in personal stories, both positive and negative. As much as cakes are a symbol of joy and life, they are also complicated and have a nefarious history connected to colonialism and gender inequality. I search for these dualities in the pictures.” The cakes in Cig Harvey’s photographs range from the dignified to the zany. Each is an offering to be shared with those present and those gone.

CIG HARVEY grew up in the county of Devon in South West England and received her MFA from Rockport College in Maine. Her photographs and artist books have been widely exhibited internationally. They are in the permanent collections of The Library of Congress, Yale University, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Farnsworth Art Museum, and the International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Her first solo museum exhibition was in 2012 at the Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway, in conjunction with the release of her first monograph, You Look At Me Like An Emergency(Schilt Publishing). In 2019, she had a solo exhibition at the Ogunquit Museum of Art, and most recently, her work was featured in the exhibition, In Bloom, at Fotografiska Museum, Stockholm, Sweden. She was awarded the Prix Virginia Laureate in 2018 and the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Maine in America Award in 2021. In 2022, she was the JP Morgan Highlighted Artist at Paris Photo. She lives in Rockport, Maine.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

14/05/23

Artist Robert Hamilton @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland — Feeding the Fishes

Robert Hamilton: Feeding the Fishes

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

June 2 — 24, 2023

Robert Hamilton (1917-2004)

Feeding the Fishes

Oil on board, 24 x 24 inches

Robert Hamilton (1917-2004)

A Fish in Trouble, 1998

Oil on masonite, 24 x 24 inches

Robert Hamilton (1917‑2004) graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1939. During World War II, he was a captain and P47 bomber pilot, flying one hundred missions and earning a Distinguished Flying Cross. Following the war, he returned to RISD to teach painting and drawing for thirty-four years. Artists Yvonne Jacquette, George Lloyd, David Estey, and Eric Hopkins are among his many students. Upon retiring in 1981, he moved full-time to Port Clyde, Maine, where he devoted the rest of his life to painting. A prolific artist, Robert Hamilton produced over six hundred works, treating the image as a stage for depicting fantastical dreams, and invented narratives that brim with humor, pathos, and an unquenchable zest for life. His love of jazz—his son is the noted jazz saxophonist Scott Hamilton—is reflected in the syncopation of his colors and his invented imagery. “I knew my paintings had to be improvised, spontaneous, made up out of whole cloth, one thing leading to another, accidental, a series of metamorphoses, surprised arrivals, ” he wrote. His friend and neighbor, Andrew Wyeth, called Robert Hamilton “a real painter.”

In 1974, Robert Hamilton was Artist in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. During the later decades of his career, he chose to exhibit his work primarily at his property in Port Clyde. In 1999, he had solo exhibitions at the Farnsworth Art Museum and the RISD Museum, and in 2011, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. His work is in the permanent collections of the Farnsworth Art Museum, the Portland Museum of Art, and the RISD Museum.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

13/05/23

Kevin Xiques @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland - This Is For You

Kevin Xiques: This Is For You

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

May 5 - 27, 2023

Kevin Xiques

Daniel Said I Could, 2023

Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches

Kevin Xiques

One Broken Rule, 2023

Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 inches

Kevin Xiques creates lyrical, multi-layered abstract paintings that dance with the marks of his brush. A self-taught artist, he approaches the canvas intuitively, responding to his emotions and guided by the painting process. His palette ranges from delicate veils of pinks, corals, and light blue to intense hues of cobalt, ultramarine, khaki green, and signal orange. Using a variety of brushes and mark-making tools, his lively surfaces bear evidence of his hand. Composed of differently textured lines and shapes that weave and intertwine with deliberate splashes and drips, sweeping strokes, and shuddering fans of color. In several recent works, patches of the canvas are left bare, and shapes extend past the edges. Kevin Xiques, who lives in Portland, Maine, began painting in December 2020 and is now completely immersed in his practice. It is a language he feels at home in and finds liberating. He says, “My paintings are the manifestation of the freedom I have gained, and the freedom I am hoping every individual will come to realize.”

Kevin Xiques received a BA in Philosophy with a Film and Television Studies minor from the University of Vermont. He was awarded a David C. Driskell Fellowship and Black Seed Studio Residency at Indigo Arts Alliance and a SPACE Gallery Studio Grant in Portland, Maine. In 2022, he was selected as one of eighteen Maine artists to watch by Maine Magazine.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

12/05/23

Elizabeth Osborne @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland - Verdant

Elizabeth Osborne: Verdant

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

May 5 - June 24, 2023

Elizabeth Osborne

Manchester by the Sea, 2016,

Watercolor and acrylic on paper, 30 x 22-1/2 inches

Elizabeth Osborne

Cliffs, 2020

Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 inches

Elizabeth Osborne has been actively painting for over sixty years, with a distinguished career from the 1960s to the present. Her luminous images in oil and watercolor bridge formal aspects of color and light with explorations of nature’s changing conditions and atmosphere. Elizabeth Osborne received her BFA from the University of Pennsylvania and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She has traveled widely throughout Europe, the American Southwest, Mexico, and the Atlantic Coast from Maryland to Down East Maine, where she lives today. Her paintings bear the imprint of direct observation and specificity of place while also embracing abstraction. The views in her compositions are often outward to the sea or landscape beyond. At their most abstract, Elizabeth Osborne's works vibrate with expressive lines of intense color, suggesting nature's radiance. In other images, there is a quiet stillness, a mood of contemplation and introspection, signaling a reflective understanding of art's spiritual and metaphysical possibilities.

Elizabeth Osborne has had over forty solo shows and over ninety group exhibitions at museums and galleries throughout the United States. In 2022, a retrospective exhibition of her work was presented at Berry Campbell Gallery in New York. She received a MacDowell Colony Grant, a Fulbright Scholarship, and awards from the Ford Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her works are in many museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Delaware Art Museum, James A. Michener Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Woodmere Art Museum, and others.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY

365 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841

www.dowlingwalsh.com

21/01/22

2022 Winter/Spring exhibitions @ CMCA, Rockland - Center for Maine Contemporary Art

2022 Winter/Spring exhibitions

Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland

January 29 - May 8, 2022

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) announces four Winter/Spring exhibitions. Related events, including artist talks and an artists’ reception, will be announced in the coming weeks on the CMCA's website.

Nicola López | Visions, Phantoms, and Apparitions

Marilyn Moss Rockefeller Lobby + Karen and Rob Brace Hall

Nicola López's solo exhibition will feature the monumental mixed media installation, Barren Lands Breed Strange Visions, accompanied by three related bodies of work that collectively view our past, present and future through the lens of climate change. López’s works for the exhibition exist somewhere between hopes and apprehensions, depicting human-built structures that are strange, beautiful, ominous, and even impossible. In addition to gallery hours, López's exhibition will be visible at night from CMCA's courtyard through our floor-to-ceiling lobby windows.

Chris Doyle | The Fabricators

Bruce Brown Gallery + Karen and Rob Brace Hall

The exhibition will premiere Doyle’s 2021 digital animation, The Fabricators on a screen spanning 48 feet in length. The Fabricators features a group of related machines locked in loops of perpetual labor. Products, by-products, and waste are transported through conduits that weave through space. Because the figures and gestures of the system appear anthropomorphic, one can’t help but look at the elements that make up The Fabricators and wonder about the future of human activity as the majority of production is transferred from man to machine.

Young Sun Han | Passages From a Memoir + Tourist in the Dark

Guy D. Hughes Gallery

Arising out of research into family narratives and grassroots peace movements on Jeju Island, Young Sun Han will present text and photo-based installations that respond to consequences of war and migration in North and South Korea. Through research and travel – mining memoir, oral histories, articles, travel brochures, and forbidden photographs – Han’s installation examines stories of the Korean diaspora.

Walk the Line

Main Gallery

Walk the Line features an exceptionally diverse range of works by eight Maine and Maine-connected artists who share a central use of linear or geometric forms in their compositions. Seen together, these artists underscore the expressive power of the line through works that span assemblage, photography, textile, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and artist books. Artists featured in the exhibition include Paolo Arao, Grace DeGennaro, Clint Fulkerson, John Houck, Jennie C. Jones, Jeff Kellar, Paula McCartney, and Will Sears.

These exhibitions are curated by Executive Director and Chief Curator, Timothy Peterson with Curatorial Assistant, Rachel Romanski and in collaboration with the artists.

CMCA - CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART

21 Winter Street, Rockland 04841, Maine

cmcanow.org

____________

26/06/19

Ann Craven @ CMCA, Rockland - Birds We Know

Ann Craven: Birds We Know
Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland
June 29 - October 13, 2019

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) presents a major exhibition of artist ANN CRAVEN’s paintings. The exhibition, Ann Craven: Birds We Know, is the first show of the noted artist’s work in Maine, where she has been a seasonal resident and has been painting for more than 25 years.

Ann Craven is widely known for her lushly colored, mesmerizing portraits of the moon, birds, flowers, and other images, which she revisits in serial fashion, as well as her painted bands of color, which document her process. Ann Craven says, ”My paintings are a result of mere observation, experiment, and chance, and contain a variable that’s constant and ever-changing—the moment just past.”

Birds We Know presents a comprehensive selection of the artist’s work, and is accompanied by an illustrated, hardcover catalog with an essay by Christopher B. Crosman, founding curator, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and former director, Farnsworth Art Museum.

In the essay, Crosman states, “...Ann Craven’s birds, moons, trees, and her stripe and palette paintings all enforce the hard stop our mind and eye make before inexplicable paintings, paintings that affirm an inseparability of beauty, truth and virtue. This is painting at its most authentic and original, at its most memorable and tenderly remarkable.”

Ann Craven began painting in Maine in the early 1990s. First in a borrowed barn near Slab City Road in the mid-coast village of Lincolnville, then from her own barn that she converted to a studio on a farm she purchased nearby. Lincolnville and the surrounding region has harbored artists for decades, beginning in the 1950s when Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd and other New York-based artists started summering in the area. It was on Lincolnville beach, a small strip of sand anchored by The Lobster Pound restaurant, that Craven painted her first “Moon” painting in 1995. The experience, she says, “gave me my subject matter, I was literally chasing the moon.”

For Ann Craven, painting serial versions of the moon on site was a way to conflate the momentary with the constant. The moon became for her a symbol of time and memory, themes that remain the primary focus of her work. The paintings of birds soon followed, inspired by color-plates found in her Italian grandmother’s vintage ornithology books. Like the moon the birds serve as a touchstone for memory, each repetition of the image a revisiting of a moment, a recalling of loved ones.

In 2008, Ann Craven moved from Lincolnville to an historic house on the banks of the St. George River in Cushing. The property had an old garden shed that became her new studio and, importantly, a majestic purple beech tree hugging the shore. This 100-plus-year-old tree is Craven’s newest motif. “It reminded me of the moon,” she says, “because it was round and because of all the life it had seen. Families coming and going, life lived. Like the moon it’s a constant that ebbs and flows, but the opposite of the moon in that it changes with the day and becomes a silhouette against the sunset.”

Ann Craven is a diarist, each of her paintings is inscribed with the date and time of its making, and she meticulously inventories and records each year’s work. Recently she began exhibiting her extensive series of Untitled (Palettes), ranging from 1999 to present. Painting wet on wet in oils, she mixes her colors on light-duty pre-stretched canvases. “The Palettes are my indexed color inventory,” she says. “They are a way for me to hold on to what I just painted—a moon or flower or bird.”

In addition to numerous group exhibitions worldwide, Ann Craven had her first retrospective, titled TIME, at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France, in 2014. Other recent major solo exhibitions include Promise (Birds for Chicago), Shane Campbell, Chicago, 2019; Sunset Moon, Karma, NY, 2018; Snowbirds, Nina Johnson, Miami, 2018; Animals 1999-2017, Southard Reid, London, 2017; Hello, Hello, Hello, Maccarone, NY, 2016, and Ann Craven, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, 2014.

Her work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, Modern Painters, Art News, LA Times, Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, The New Yorker, Frieze, among others. Ann Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and private collections worldwide.

Ann Craven: Birds We Know is made possible at CMCA with support from Max Mara, and individual donors.

CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART - CMCA
21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME 04841
cmcanow.org

Dan Mills @ CMCA, Rockland - Human Topographies

Dan Mills | Human Topographies
Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland
June 29 - October 13, 2019

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) presents a large-scale exhibition of artist DAN MILLS' work. The exhibition, Dan Mills | Human Topographies, is the first solo show of the artist’s work in Maine since he moved to the state in 2010.

Dan Mills makes work that is full of observations about historic and current events. He conducts extensive research on topics such as current wars and conflicts, colonialism, and life expectancy by state, and creates paintings and works on paper that visualize data and information on these subjects.

Dan Mills frequently uses maps as the space to explore his ideas. He began incorporating maps into his work in the early 1990s while researching the quincentennial of what is euphemistically referred to as The First Encounter. Since then, he has explored history and colonization in paintings and collages on large roll-down school maps and in an atlas of future states, the loss of history through erasure and over-painting on maps, visualized data about current wars and conflicts in world maps, and data about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness on U.S. maps.

Dan Mills has exhibited widely, with solo shows in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and at academic museums and galleries throughout the U.S. His work has been included in many group exhibitions including “Crooked Data: (Mis)Information in Contemporary Art”, University of Richmond Museums (2017); “Ideologue”, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City (2016); and “Dissident Futures”, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2013-14). His upcoming exhibitions include solo shows at Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston (2020), and Museum of Art at University of New Hampshire (2020).

Dan Mills has been a frequent speaker, panelist, or interviewee at institutions including the Chicago Cultural Center, Maine Public (NPR), Public Radio International, The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and Vanderbilt University. His work has been featured in numerous publications including Flash Art International, Hyperallergic, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Los Angeles Times, and New Art Examiner. His book, The US Future States Atlas, was published by Perceval Press, Santa Monica, in 2009. Mills’ work is in many collections including the British Library, UCLA, Library of Congress, John T. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Union College.

Dan Mills earned a BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology and MFA from Northern Illinois University. He has studios in a mill building in southern Maine, and on outer Cape Cod. Dan Mills and his wife, artist Gail Skudera, live in Lewiston, where he directs the Bates College Museum of Art.

Dan Mills | Human Topographies is made possible at CMCA with support from the Becton Family Foundation.

CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART - CMCA
21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME 04841
cmcanow.org