’Round here

Greater Portland’s best and brightest at the Danforth

By Jenna Russell

“BRIDGE,” collage-acrylic, 14” x 14”, 2000, Ann Slocum. by Chris Thompson.

People don’t “emerge” that often in everyday life. The verb implies a drama onstage or on film, characters coming forth from water or darkness to symbolize transformation.

Artists, however, always seem to be emerging. The word is popular for describing the up-and-coming artist, the artist “on the cusp of discovery,” probably because it sounds more cheerful than “struggling.” Why imagine Kraft macaroni and cramped apartments when you can envision brand-new butterflies instead?

Semantics aside, there’s real drama when talent steps out of obscurity. That’s the attraction at the current show of emerging local artists, the “Greater Portland Regional 50” at the Danforth Gallery. The “50” refers to the geographic boundary set for entries, which had to come from within 50 miles of the city. Four jurors reviewed and rated slides from 117 hopefuls in all media, and selected 49 pieces by 34 artists. The title is redundant (Greater Portland, Portland Region?), but the work itself feels essential.

What does the emerging artist look like? Like P. Antonio Guerrero, whose standout “Atlas” makes a startling impression from the gallery’s approximate center, even as it stands only inches off the floor. The elements are simple: crumpled newspaper, frosted on its peaks with black spray paint and spread over a base of square wooden pallets. From above, it’s a landscape seen from space, coal-colored ridges shot through with snow-white valleys. Crouch down, and the unpainted newsprint in the creases reveals legible columns from the Wall Street Journal, high-yield bonds and London Metal Exchange prices. Stand up, and the rows of tiny numbers blur into light and shadow. The effect is magnificent, whether or not it’s intended as a comment on the stock market’s smallness in the universe.

The wide-ranging group show is a masterpiece of contrasts, and there’s no overstating the weirdness of some of these juxtapositions. Next to Guerrero’s low-lying, black-and-white, conceptual moonscape, a bulging turquoise sculpture of a nude, fleshy woman-goddess lolls on a platform. A dimpled, polyurethane essence of liberation, she opens her figure completely, limbs akimbo, as does her sister, who flies through the air. Artist Steffi Greenbaum laughs off deprivation and repression with these indulgent, joyful idols as big as loaves of bread. Their power lies in unapologetic excess, a quality enhanced by the restraint of nearby “Atlas.”

Both pieces are drenched with originality, but it’s easier to imagine “Atlas” in the Portland Museum’s recent Biennial, partly because of the nudes’ risky kitschy quality. In fact, the potential for fat lady jokes adds to the relevant content, forcing viewers to examine their biases.

Like the Danforth 50, the Biennial was juried from slide submissions; by a painter, a Boston gallery owner and a Boston museum curator. A survey of less-established Maine artists on a smaller, more localized scale, the Greater Portland Regional called on four jurors: Bowdoin College curator Alison Ferris, River Tree Arts Director Carl Richardson, arts writer Chris Thompson (a Phoenix contributor), and Portland gallery owner Andres Verzosa. Each brought one artist to the show free of the others’ approval.

Like the Biennial, the regional exhibition is particularly rich in photography, which constitutes about one-third of the works in the show. Installation is another strength. Included is hard-to-categorize concept art like “Book in Flight” by Aaron Stephan, an old book hung from a beam and rigged with a motor to noisily simulate the flapping motion of wings.

The Danforth Gallery’s Helen Rivas Rose said a fair share of submissions came from outside the city, and estimated the artists’ average age was “thirtysomething.” The show “illustrates that greater Portland’s artists are alert to what’s happening in the world . . . and are contemporary with it,” she said.

“I was surprised how much was conceptual and installation-oriented,” said Verzosa, of Aucocisco. “There was a lot of environmentally-aware work, about how man and nature interact, and how we’re not good stewards. I’m not sure if that’s a factor of being in Maine or not.”

The most explicit environmental statement is by Carl Haase, whose “Block Clean-up Project on Commercial Street between Maple Street and Center Street” is a tall, clear plastic column filled with actual garbage collected on the street. Fast-food wrappers, price tags, foil and Styrofoam fragments are packed tightly inside, in layers that suggest a core sample from a landfill. The column sits in a pot of soil, and at its top, a real plant grows in a narrow band of dirt. The green leaves pay tribute to nature’s resilience in the face of human abuse. The plant is watered regularly by gallery staff, per the artist’s instructions, and the “living” sculpture changes as moisture seeps through the garbage and hastens decomposition.

There’s nothing beautiful about garbage, or, some would argue, factories and power lines, but Mark Marchesi’s color photographs, hanging nearby, depict a strangely romantic industrial landscape. In “Cloud Factory,” asphalt rolls toward a distant factory or power plant, its tall, slim smokestack shrouded in mist. In the pale, metallic light, it resembles a fairy-tale castle high in the clouds. The mood is dreamy, the atmosphere painterly-luminous. What’s disturbing in “Glen Canyon” isn’t the blight of metal towers around the natural orange-red chasm, but the viewer’s realization of how common such scars on the landscape have become. Hovering over ancient ridges in the rocks, the man-made structures look delicate, almost transient, and most viewers will accept them without a moment’s protest.

Marchesi’s c-prints are as good as much of the photography in the Biennial. Their quality is matched by Michelle Bolduc’s “Hanging Garden,” another color print with a more intimate subject. In this interior study, a few bras dangle from a hook on the ceiling; possibly hung up to dry. It seems an odd, inconvenient location, accessible only by standing on a bed or chair, and the invisibility of any furniture heightens the disoriented feeling and the mystery of their placement. We see only the top third of the room, mostly unused space, bathed in intense light filtered through dark curtains. The lingerie looks as fragile as flowers against the green ceiling, like a dazed bird trapped indoors, uncertain how to escape.

The photograph fulfills one of Versoza’s definitions for success: “You get to hear a good story by seeing it.” Bolduc gives us props, an evocative setting, a question; the plot and characters are ours to invent.

Light and lingerie feature again in the less poetically-titled “Mostly Naked Chick #247,802,465.22.” The use of “chick” borders on obnoxious, though photographer Jon King probably intends to poke fun at himself for touring such well-traveled territory. The banal slang of the title belies the gentle, loving feeling of the photograph, where a woman in her underwear stands at a window wrapped in gauzy curtains and sunlight. She smiles through her filmy shroud, which does nothing to blur her realness and solidity. Her straightforward smile, not her nakedness, is the real exposure: Consider how rarely emotion is expressed by the subjects of “art” portraits.

The predominance of photography raises legitimate questions about the state of painting in Portland and the jurors’ preferences. At the show’s opening, one artist took issue with the Danforth’s decision not to have an artist on the jury. Addressing concerns about a contemporary or conceptual bias, Thompson said he made a conscious effort to consider every submission, however distant from his own taste.

“I tried to look at work I wouldn’t normally gravitate to and evaluate it on its own terms,” he said. “I like the idea of a show that’s really varied.”

Traditional subjects and mediums are represented. Painter James Trask pushes watercolor to oil-like maximums of contrast in the small landscape “An October Afternoon,” where black trees frame an incandescent yellow bush. Diane Dahlke makes her mark in acrylics with the memorable, technically skillful “Bass in a Blouse,” another study in contrasts. The dark, clammy head of a dead fish pokes through the neck of a clean, dry, white shirt, dampening the collar with a faint fringe of blood. It’s peculiar and lovely, a potent combination.

Radically different and equally impressive is an untitled acrylic abstraction on tea-colored paper, in which Shirley Haynes depicts liquid forgiveness in intuitive, almost invisible layers. The lines are white and gray and sienna-colored tendrils, fluid and connected as seaweeds or grasses. The painting reads as an act of tenderness, incidentally elegant.

In Corey Daniels’ drawings, emotions can be literally if incompletely read, in words half-legibly scrawled in crayon and pencil. In an untitled piece that hangs in the hallway, “my love is gone” emerges from the hurried rows of half-formed letters, giving the piece the confessional tone of a journal entry. The steady black chalk pattern becomes a kind of comfort, forward progress in the wake of the loss it describes. Like Haynes’s work, it’s recorded in a language of understatement.

The jurors seem to be in agreement on this sort of subtlety, favored throughout the show and in their individual selections. Verzosa invited photographer Martha Mickles, whose close-up studies of hands are among the show’s simplest images. Thompson endorsed Lauren Fensterstock, another less-is-more visionary. In “hideaways,” three doll-size silver drawers are installed in a big white box. Dwarfed by the unadorned square, their tiny keyholes promise access to blankness.

Catey Draper is the choice of Ferris, the Bowdoin curator. “Drink” and “Swallow” are works of embroidery on squares of fine white linen, but instead of traditional flowers, the stitches form clumsy cocktail glasses and red lips. These have a breezy, unfinished feel, at odds with our perception of the lost arts of needle and thread. The martini-glass logo mimics trendy icons mass-produced for Targets everywhere; the slickness of modern America is invoked in a context of old-fashioned quirkiness.

Will these artists be fully emerged when they can stop working in restaurants, or when they sell out a gallery opening? Maybe a better benchmark is derived from Thompson’s assertion that the show is “only as good as the ideas, discussion, and future works it provokes.” By that standard, these artists are on their way out of the darkness. The roomful of ideas at the Danforth affirms the region’s future as certainly as the Biennial did the state’s artistic present.

 

Jenna Russel can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.