Saturday, September 28th| 3-5:00pm
Free and open to the public
Join us in welcoming our 2024 Fall Exhibitions with a celebratory opening reception and refreshments in the lobby. We hope to see you there!
On View
i forgot to remember | Katarina Weslien
September 28 2024 – May 4 2025
The Center for Maine Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition i forgot to remember, featuring the work of Katarina Weslien. Drawing on a four decade-long multi-disciplinary practice, artist Katarina Weslien has created a large-scale and expansive exhibition for the Main Gallery at CMCA. i forgot to remember is immersive and experiential reflecting the artist’s “deep, on-going interest in the tactile and metaphoric power of cloth; how mute objects speak; and how objects elicit memories, emotions, and embodied imaginations in the face of impermanence, disorder, and displacement.” Curated by Maine-based writer and independent curator, Suzanne Weaver, i forgot to remember opens on September 28, 2024, and runs through May 4, 2025.
Cut, Bend, Burn | Letha Wilson
September 28 – January 12 2025
Cut, Bend, Burn, a solo exhibition by Letha Wilson opens on Saturday, September 28, 2024 in CMCA’s Bruce Brown Gallery. Cut, Bend, Burn is a selection of Letha’s work spanning the past nine years, highlighting her enduring curiosity and ingenuity within the photographic medium. The seductive qualities of landscape photography are not lost on any of us. Our phones are full of sunsets, wooded scenes or dappled evening light as an attempt to capture a verisimilitude, a place holder for the grandeur of the moment. Yet when has a photo ever been able to be a stand in for the actual experience? Letha Wilson uses this discrepancy between representation and experience as a place to occupy within her work. This show has been curated by Maine-based independent curator, Hilary Schaffner, who has a career spanning over 20 years throughout the East coast.
From the Collection of Lord Red | Kyle Downs
September 28 – May 4 2025
From the Collection of Lord Red is the first Maine solo show of exhibiting artist Kyle Downs, opening September 28 in the Marilyn Moss Rockefeller Lobby + Karen and Rob Brace Hall. Downs presents wall sculptures made from strips of discarded basketballs, referencing post-production practices, pop culture and the psychology of collecting. Kyle Downs is a sportsman, and to see his basketball-strip tapestries, one might guess that his sport of choice is Basketball. In truth, Downs channels his athleticism through the thrill of the hunt, searching junk shops and flea markets for sturdy materials, rare records, and surprising objects with unlikely surfaces. Downs relishes the heightened state of intentional searching and the discovery of diamonds in the rough, reframing collecting as an act of material obsession to a more wholesome meditation on the quality of attention and honoring craft. Through dedicated hours of careful cutting, gluing, and rearranging, Downs transforms the recognizable object of a basketball, remixing a known cultural signifier into something surprising and new. Curated by South Portland, Maine-based artist and curator, Tessa Greene O’Brien, From the Collection of Lord Red runs until May 4th, 2025.
Paint the Air | Lauren Luloff
September 28 – January 12 2025
Paint the Air, a solo exhibition of new works by Lauren Luloff (b.1980) curated by Hilary Schaffner, features expansive paintings which reflect her continued fascination with textiles, pattern, repetition, form, and color, as a means of expression. The scope of Lauren’s new large scale works can be overwhelming at first. They defy categorization as they employ painting, textile design, collage, and the mechanics of quilting. These are all mediums and modalities within the artist’s usual practice and visual vocabulary. It is the deeply personal nature of the work that turns these paintings into themselves.