Saturday, September 30th | 3-5:00pm
Free and open to the public
Join us in welcoming our 2023 fall exhibitions with a celebratory opening reception and refreshments in our courtyard.
Jeane Cohen | This Watching Land
Jeane Cohen’s paintings in This Watching Land progress through animal worlds, various landscapes, firescapes, and abstraction and ask the viewer to consider nature as sentient and always watching us back. The landscapes are not portrayals of particular places, instead they represent explorations of natural terrains. This Watching Land is Cohen’s first museum solo exhibition and immediately follows her year-long residency at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (Brooklyn). This exhibition will premier the works she created during her residency. Additionally, this exhibition will feature a stained glass window that will be installed into a skylight in the main gallery.
Alison Hildreth | Darkness Visible
The Center for Maine Contemporary Art is pleased to present a solo exhibition featuring works from two ongoing series of works by the acclaimed Maine-based artist Alison Hildreth. The exhibition, titled Darkness Visible, contains large-scale mixed media work on Gampi paper featuring aerial views of the earth, paired with similarly scaled oil paintings on canvas offering views of planets and other celestial bodies. The shifting perspective and media selections between the two series offer an exciting view into Hildreth’s dynamic artistic practice.
Shinique Smith | Continuous Poem will showcase her monumental, 28-foot-wide artwork, Memories of my youth streak by on the 23 (2019), which stirs together paint, textiles, and pieces of mirrors in a vibrant impression that evokes the sensation of moving down a street. The seven-panel work is, in part, autobiographical: it animates familiar memories of the artist and the number 23 bus she would ride to and from her high school in Baltimore. In her accompanying series of 30 x 30-inch paintings, each artwork conjures an emotion that feels familiar but cannot be entirely pinned down, evading a too close definition or categorization. These glimpses into the artist’s recollection flatten her personal history and memory in one continuous moment that collages all that came before—piece by piece and heaped onto the canvas—into the present.
Gamaliel Rodriguez | (In)hospitable
In(hospitable) makes reference to the infraestructural failures that make residing in Puerto Rico challenging and challenges the pictorial conventions that depict the tropics as paradisiacal. Showcasing both an everyday attentiveness to his surroundings and making visible legacies of extraction that might not be readily apparent in the landscape. In(hospitable) in its gesture of subversion asks if there is potential in the hostile. Gamaliel Rodriguez turns to the immediacy of his own home in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico in a series of large-scale drawings created in the past year. Continuing his interrogation of the Puerto Rican landscape, Rodriguez foregrounds the failure of infrastructure and alludes to a dystopic future that is the byproduct of extraction, experimentation, military occupation, and a failed project of modernization. Likewise, as this new series of drawings foregrounds, the artist’s work stems from a sustained, committed, and attentive engagement with the area which he inhabits.