Hear ye! Hear ye! New USM faculty speak out BY IAN PAIGE
	"UNVEILING" Work by Sama Alshaibi + Joel Seah | USM/Gorham Art Gallery | Through Oct 15 | 207.780.5009

The message couldn’t be any clearer. Housed at USM’s Gorham campus Art Gallery is evidence of two new faculty members’ intellectual and artistic prowess, a joint exhibition, "Unveiling," sampling work by Sama Alshaibi and Joel Seah. Despite a variety of media and artistic approaches, the collection still comes across as a focused message, like someone quietly holding a picket sign in a crowd of screaming protesters.

Alshaibi gives voice to her Palestinian heritage. Knowing her American audience’s perception of Palestine and its culture is largely influenced by the fleeting stories they get from the media, Alshaibi’s work attempts to return humanity and history to a people that have been boiled down to a blanket image of "terrorist."

The most effective piece for illuminating Palestinian culture is the 28-minute video Where Birds Fly, from 2004. The video takes the form of personal narrative, unpretentiously documenting Alshaibi’s findings and revelations as she returns to her childhood home of Iraq and then to Palestine in search of her grandmother’s home before exile. Long montages set to music reveal visual details of Palestinian life, ripping it out of its usual cage of otherness and exoticism for the Western eye. Interviews with family members matter-of-factly present a personal history that helps the viewer put the history textbook down and understand current events as affecting individual people. Impeccable editing makes this video fly by.

Ten self-portrait giclee prints lining two walls are by far the most beautifully executed works in the show. Each one reveals a pregnant Alshaibi in earthy black-and-white tones, simultaneously inviting and otherworldly. The artist leaves the splotchy frames from the negative surrounding each portrait for a pleasing aesthetic.

"Target Practice" is a particularly representative print from the series. The subject’s body is framed out, leaving a highlighted pregnant belly and legs, leading the viewer’s eye down to a target design on the floor. Dreamlike shadows veil reality to make this pregnant body a sign, the artist hoping to dispel the contemporary signifier of Palestinian women as suicide bomber factories.

Joel Seah holds up his half of the weight in the exhibition as well. Most notable on arrival to the gallery space is Seah’s "Homo Depot." Two walls have been transformed by the artist into a schematic for a hardware store, complete with blueprint-style drafted lines and protruding signs in a familiar corporate orange color with the names of various departments. Suddenly "Bath and Shower Units," "Oil-Based Sealants," and "Pansies" (located in the back of the store by "Customer Service") take on another meaning. Seah’s deconstructionist tactics divest these simple hardware signs of their original meaning while simultaneously providing new meaning on the reverse side with sweet and simple anecdotes of gay couples’ intentions for home improvement projects: "Jim and Dave are putting up electric fences to keep deer out of the vegetable garden."

All of Seah’s works are colorful and clever facets of this same stone. The original installation in Saugatuck, Michigan, "How Does Your Garden Grow?," is documented through photography and original materials. Here again, Seah uses word play to explore new gay discourses within straight society’s framework. A flowerbed in front of a picture-perfect home is labeled with the usual nametags stuck in the dirt like you see in greenhouses. These official Latin names instead reveal small moments universal to healthy couples, regardless of sexual orientation such as "Three Bedrooms With a White Picket Fencium" and "Doing Sundae Crossword Puzzlaeum Togethus."

Seah allows his conceptual tactics to become the subject in "Proposal for a New Hanky Code No. 1." Lining the walls are serialized sketches of hanky designs rendered in colored pencil and masked with a top layer of white, which reveals a negative space image distinct to each piece. Each hanky and its respective icon represent a different desirable trait in a partner, recalling the "hanky code" used by gay men in the ’60s and ’70s to communicate their sexual persuasion and preferences. Once again, the initial discourse is replaced with contemporary concerns. The intricate design of one color of hanky is masked with the silhouette of an anatomically correct heart. Below the drawing is the caption, "Affectionate: Holds Hands, Kisses in Public and Isn’t Afraid to Say I Love You." Similarly, a house stands for "Dutiful: Visits Mom and Dad Regularly but Doesn’t Come With Apron Strings."

Both of USM’s new Art faculty members express urgent desire to communicate their messages. With well-executed work by the artists and careful curation by the Gorham campus art gallery, "Unveiling" helps get the message to the viewer loud and clear.

Ian Paige can be reached at ianpaige@gmail.com