Curated by Tessa Greene O’Brien
January 27, 2024 – May 6, 2024
Carla Week’s expansive mural, On This Island, engulfs the viewer in a space of deep calm. Painted in her signature style, Weeks invents a vernacular that layers coded landscape elements with architectural details, all drawn from her home and surroundings on Arrowsic Island in Maine. Accompanying the mural are a series of recent paintings by Weeks that explore similar themes of patterned memory and reverence for place.
Weeks pays close attention to the world around her, observing and listening with a quiet sensitivity. She identifies distinct visual markers in her habitual places and spaces, then isolates the imagery to build an alphabet of minimal shapes. These symbols are arranged in airy, repeating patterns and rendered in harmonic and muted color palettes. Weeks uses repetition in her work to connect to memory, drawing parallels between the rhythm of marks and the ways that we replay a moment in an attempt to retain it. The symbols overlap in tonal transparent layers, mimicking the ways in which memories can exist simultaneously in our consciousness. Like islands in a bay, Weeks floats windows, trees, moons, and doorways in an open sea of softly mottled color. This spaciousness allows the viewer’s eye to move slowly through the paintings, finding their own meaning at a meditative pace.
The paintings on display reflect a selection of works spanning the last two years. The two newest works, Arrowsic Island (day) & Arrowsic Island (night), were made in conversation with the mural, all specifically referencing the house that Weeks shares with her partner and dog, and the land through which they adventure. Also on display are paintings from her 2022 “Winter Grid” series, whose calendar-like floating grids reference the passage of time in Maine winters. Layers of translucent blue and white evoke the rhythms and routines that winter invites, as time becomes both fleeting and monotonously predictable. Arrowsic Window in Prussian Green represents work from her “Stained Glass” series, in which Weeks reflects on the relationship between architecture and nature as viewed through the windows of her home, nestled in the forests of coastal Maine.
About the Artist:
Carla Weeks is a British-born painter and muralist based in Midcoast Maine. In Carla’s work, pattern is used as a vehicle to describe place and articulate the subtleties and nuance of sensory memory. Her work is informed by her personal interactions with both the natural landscape and built environment.
Carla Weeks, Arrowsic Island, Night, 2023, oil and chalk on linen covered panel, 36”x 48”
About the Curator:
Tessa Greene is a Maine-based artist and curator. A Maine native, she received a BS in Fine Art from Skidmore College and an MFA from Maine College of Art and Design. She was a 2022-2023 Residential Fellow at The Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and previous residencies include Surf Point Foundation, Tides Institute, Monson Arts, Haystack, Hewnoaks, Vermont Studio Center, Joseph A. Fiore Art Center, and the Stephen Pace House. O’Brien co-directed Able Baker Contemporary gallery from 2019-2022, and continues to integrate curation into her creative practice. She has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, and has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, St. Botolph Club Foundation, Ellis Beauregard, Maine Arts Commission, and the Kindling Fund via SPACE Gallery & the Warhol Foundation. She lives in South Portland, Maine.
Header Image: Carla Weeks, Grid Study in Prussian Blue 4, 2023, oil on linen, 24″x24″