Arts & Leisure
Cutting-edge art at the Portland Museum of Art 2007 Biennial
By Rose Safran
PORTLAND - Over 900 applicants sent 3,680 images on slides to be considered for
the Portland Museum of Art's 2007 Biennial, the fifth such exhibition highlighting work by emerging and established artists associated with Maine in various ways, as year-round residents, summer residents, students, award winners, represented in Maine collections, etc.
From this impressive quantity of art submitted, only 61 artists and 98 works of art "made it" into the ongoing museum exhibit and among the lucky ones were three artists from the local area - photographer Tom Hibschman and painters Gail Spaien and Simon Harling.
Three jurors spent hours reviewing the immense number of submissions - gallery owner Ellen Miller of Boston; New Mexico-based artist Johnnie Ross, who was
formerly on the faculty of the Maine College of Art, and Philadelphia-based freelance curator and art critic Judith Stein. Clearly, such a task tends to be overwhelming, and I can only imagine the behind-the-scenes adjustments, decisions and occasional compromises that had to take place in selecting for the exhibit under 3 percent of all the ideas reviewed.
Emerging from this difficult effort is a collective statement to the effect that Maine definitely retains its hold as a place of inspiration, a resource conducive to originality, frequently environmentally-charged, but, nonetheless capable of incorporating technological advances in materials and in particular, in video, installation and photography while, at the same time, reaching out to the happenings in the global community and hence, sensitive to the challenges of a rapidly-changing universe. Although paintings predominate - and we expect this dominance, for undoubtedly they comprised the larger majority of the submissions - video, photography, computer-generated art and site-specific works speak to the 21st century.
Perhaps no work reflects the times more so than Maine Arts Commission grantee Sam Van Aken's installation which incorporates digital prints with a multi-channel video projection and uses Richard Dreyfuss's character in the 1977 film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" to explore the cross-over and confusion between reality and fiction with movies as a primary culprit. Then, there are Portland artist Joel Seah's "Love Stories" - digital prints on wallpaper - currently embellishing sections of the museum's lobby area, copies of which are available in the museum shop - created especially for the Biennial. Also site-specific and in the lobby, clearly linked to Maine, is Sandy Litchfield's memory-based conception in oil and acrylic on mylar, latex, ink on the wall, which the artist indicates was inspired by summers in Sebago Lake and Moose Pond.
Among several videos is "Hummer" created by Bowdoin College alumnus Allan Macintyre in which the subject is the hummingbird, that diminutive flutterer migrating every summer from Mexico and Central America to Maine's mountains to nest and breed.
To capture the incredible action of this fast and fascinating bird, the artist placed a flower in a model's mouth, the flower continuously beckoning the hungry bird to repetitious feeding necessary to support its nonstop motion.
International influences appear too. For example, there is the beautifully designed small casein on paper painting, "Topkapi # 5" by Portland artist Penelope Jones, clearly based, as the artist states on the "Topkapi" scroll, a late 15th or 16th document from the Ottoman imperial treasury collection.
The exhibit does not lack for technical virtuosity using age-old media as reflected in four intricately-drawn ink on paper images - "Coral"..."Spirals"..."Knit"..."Bands" created by Bath-born Astrid Bowlby or in casein on panel images of Maine-inspired events and settings as in "Flood" and "Rockslide" by Maine artist Alan Bray.
The 2007 Biennial will remain on view at the Portland Museum of Art through June 10.
