The annual Bachelor of Fine Art student show, Produce, is showing at the Gorham Art Gallery now. The BFA degree is the most involved studio art degree offered at USM, and the 15-artist group show showcases the art majors as they graduate from concentrations in sculpture, ceramics, photography, painting,and digital art.
The show’s name was the idea of Ben Lambert, a ceramicist in the senior seminar class who’s art was selected for the Purchase Award, a yearly tradition in which the office of the president buys a piece of art. Joe Wood selected one of Lambert’s wheel-thrown and hand built earthenware “specimens” of a squid-chicken.
Produce can imply both process and product, important parts of the artist’s process. It seemed a perfect title for the show.
The four years (or more) of these contemporary artists’ early careers, evidenced in their learned processes, and culminated in the products of their creation don the walls of the Gorham Art Gallery.
Traditionally, this show sends off the art department graduates, with the student’s final critiques open to the public.
A guest panel of local professionals is invited to criticize the student’s work, to prod and ask the artists questions. This week, the panel was Bruce Brown, curator Emeritus of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art; Susan Danly, curator of photography and contemporary art at the Portland Museum of Art; and, Deborah Wing Sproul, assistant professor of sculpture at MECA.
The “cold critique” begins with questions and impressions from the audience without hearing the artist statement or any opening comments from the artist. This way, the artist can see from the viewer’s standpoint, instead of vice versa, and is challenged to answer questions regarding technique, choice, subject matter-or anything concerning the presentation of their work.
This week, the art focused on was portraiture investigating social discourse. Brianna Allen, Jessica Northgraves, Justin Levesque, Teressa MacHugh and Mariah Wiggen each had a half hour of spotlight, citique and a chance to ask their viewers for feedback and insight.
To see these works for yourself, the gallery is open from Tuesday-Friday, 11am – 4pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 1pm – 4pm. The next and final critique will be held Thursday, May 1 at 4:30.
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The artists
Brianna Allen spoke proudly. Her paintings, a series of five portraits against a dark gray wall, depict members of her family using color and a certain level of emotion to broadcast the relationship of the sitter to the painter, and her impression of the model’s personality. The panel marveled over the gesture and expressions she created. Working from life is Brianna’s focus, she says.
And she will continue it after graduation, when she plans to move to Alaska to paint portraits of tribal peoples. She hopes to stretch her subject from her personal relationship to them, to show their relationships to others or to their culture.
Her painting professor, Richard Lethem Brown, responded to her work by saying that “her exuberance in handling paint is vital and rare.” It is obvious from her paintings: she loves to paint.
Teressa MacHugh’s photographs in random order and sizes might depict dirty drunken nights of youth, but they’re alongside beautiful quiet moments that appear to fit perfectly, and add a timeless quality to a wall of her 17 selected photographs.
The images are literally snapshots of her life. She writes in her artist statement “I don’t get up until about 2 p.m. I spend the next few hours searching for something or someplace to eat. I spend my nights with the people I cherish. These are photographs of those times.”
While Susan Danly, curator of graphics and photography at the Portland Museum of Art saw the wall of random photos as “a certain approach to life” in which life didn’t appear easy, Deborah Wing Sproul said that “raw quality” was most intriguing.
Six months of photography was narrowed down to these images, which range from the sweaty chest of a man playing guitar in a club to someone on the very edge of a roof in an orange-lit snowfall. When asked why she didn’t frame the pieces, students from the class reiterated the fact that in a sequence of many captured moments, fast-moving images, the instantaneous images were best displayed as impulsively as they were shot. Doug Lakota, her classmate, finished with the remark that from the little he knew her, “her images are her capture of life, rather than a cinematic fad.”
Justin Levesque meant to bring together two communities in an exchange on the human experience, on pain, and on coping with it, in “The Waiting Room.” His life as a member of the art community and the hemophiliac community come together in the body of work presented. His installation includes a sleek shelf from a doctor’s office, upon which are jars full of printed cards. The viewers were instructed to ‘draw where it hurts’ on a card and to trade it for a card from the bottom shelf. These cards featured different colors representing different bruises. The interactive shelf was paired with portraits of hemophiliacs on the walls and photographs of their used gauze.
Through the touching, taking aspect of the project, juxtaposed against the doctor’s office setting and an art gallery, both places where touching is off-limits, Justin encouraged a community of hands-on in an otherwise sterile world of hemophilia.
The panel encouraged these concepts to be pushed into one another: community, conditions, interaction; by literally pushing the shelf closer to the photographs of patients in natural surroundings, and unifying the shelving with the frames. Justin is the only student in the show who is not a senior; he has another year of work before graduating.
Jessica Northgraves says she is a portrait photographer. But her final project is not of people, at least, not at first. On one wall, she displays large black and white photos of rooms. Empty rooms. There are shots of beds that look like they’ve been slept in, rugs that look like they’ve been stepped on, and nails that could’ve just been nailed into the wall-or, that have been there for decades.
Older architecture seems to warp, and patterned wallpaper appears aged.
“Wallpaper” is the title of the work, which includes another wall, painted black, and a small, pillowed shelf holds lockets open to photos of people. They are the people with connection to the rooms. Deborah Wing Sproul said she wanted to feel her own connection to the rooms, not see the actual owners of the space. She preferred to be left to imagine the spaces as a place she could crawl into herself. And feel the textured wallpapers, and bed frames and crooked doorways and rugs.
Mariah Wiggen showcased six mounted photographs of herself wearing a white mask. One is of her painting in a studio, one shows her bartending at a Mexican restaurant. In one, she is under a man having sex. In another, she is hugging her sister in a kitchen. She is looking directly at the camera each time and means to send a message about the roles she chooses to take, as a woman.
By wearing the mask, which the panel found interesting and pressing on many levels, she was drawing attention to her role in what could’ve otherwise been ordinary photographs of ordinary situations.