Saturday, May 25th| 3-5:00pm
Free and open to the public
Join us in welcoming our 2024 Summer exhibitions with a celebratory opening reception and refreshments in the lobby. We hope to see you there!
NATURE CULT, SEEDED | Donald Moffett
NATURE CULT, SEEDED is the latest iteration in an ongoing series and the artist’s first exhibition in Maine, where he resides on North Haven. 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. 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. The exhibition is a clarion call to the precariousness of our planet under stress. “I don’t think there are issues more important than nature and its health,” says the artist.
To Whom Keeps a Record | Arnold J. Kemp
To Whom Keeps a Record features works by 2023 Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Visual Arts Fellow, Arnold J. Kemp. A generous and generative selection that provides a snapshot into an artist’s practice, this exhibition addresses persistent questions concerning artistic research and risk, ethics and politics, self and story. One of several propositions informing this exhibition engages Kemp’s dual interest in contemporaneity and historicity: not only is his cultural practice located in the past, but it’s an ongoing construction with a capacious reach. Born in Boston, MA to Caribbean parents, Kemp is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, writer, and educator whose work is at once, poetically lyrical and culturally informed. His work, which emerges from a personal archive, serves as a reminder of today’s socio-political landscape and its reverberations in the Black psyche.
Pairing sparse, geometric works with precisely rendered portraits and landscapes is perhaps, on the surface, counterintuitive but Jones and Bauer’s paintings and drawings share deep formal and conceptual connections. Powerful yet subtle movements, focused observations, and a slowing down of time come together to create an atmosphere of reverence for the subject, for the material, and the process. The exhibition features several graphite drawings by both Jones and Bauer and this process is the root of the works on view. Jones’s attentive drawings in which she meticulously recreates the notebook pages of the likes of Ellsworth Kelly through delicate linework share a kinship with Bauer’s drawings of gardens and fields that show the history of Bauer’s decision-making through layers of softly placed and erased graphite. In fact, both Jones and Bauer use erasure as a tool to distill their works to their most potent essences, mindfully removing the extraneous and keeping only the necessary.
This exhibition features Carla Weeks’ expansive mural, On This Island, which 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.