Arts & Leisure
Area artists included in Portland Museum of Art Biennial
By Rose Safran
At a recent reception, I congratulated Kittery Point artist Tom Hibschman about his inclusion in the 2007 Portland Museum of Art Biennial.
During our discussion of his successful entry, "MossMac" - a digital photo on archival paper depicting an image of an abandoned Mac computer gathering moss, he commented, "The moss attracts bugs. You can come and see it right in my garden."
Well, the view positioned on a wall in a corridor adjacent to the Portland Museum of Art lobby speaks adequately.
A member of the Ogunquit Art Association who currently teaches and was a former gallery owner in York Harbor, Hibschman states, "My work deals with time transformations in metaphor, memory and personal association. Capturing the appearance of places that are subject to change over time is magical for me."
Certainly the moss along with its apparent entwined garden-stem inhabiting, like another form of wiring, the throwaway Mac's guts appears on target in terms of transformation. How much disposable hi-tech hardware will greenery hide, change or subtly still reveal while, simultaneously the greenery itself is transformed, perhaps even overwhelmed?
At the same reception held at the Old York Historical Society's George Marshall Store where she is currently exhibiting a stunning site-specific wall of works, indeed a major synthetic botanical garden, Kittery Point artist Gail Spaien commented that considerable research goes into her beautiful acrylic paintings of bird and floral images. Certainly, her entry, "Looking for Food, Singing Together #6" is among the most aesthetically pleasing works in the current PMA Biennial.
The artist comments, "Making beautiful, sincere objects is my way of contributing to our culture without adding to the noise. The social role of painting here is to act as an antidote, an escape, and a reminder of the continuous flux of everything. Using nature as my subject I paint the world as I would like it to be."
Realist painter Simon Harling of New Castle, N.H., is a storyteller, an artist who uses the medium of art to comment on society. His extremely precise work, detailed and using the American landscape, packs a lot in a little space. In oil on three gesso panels in "Cadillac Triptych," which is part of his "White Cadillac" series, he states, "A 1989 Fleetwood Brougham was chosen for this transcontinental project for its iconic status, its aesthetic qualities and also because the vehicle's owners seem to represent the entire spectrum of American society."
