Jeane Cohen: This Watching Land
September 30, 2023 - January 7, 2024
Jeane Cohen’s paintings in This Watching Land progress through animal worlds, various landscapes, firescapes, and abstraction and ask the viewer to consider nature as sentient and always watching us back. The landscapes are not portrayals of particular places, instead they represent explorations of natural terrains.
This Watching Land is Cohen’s first museum solo exhibition and immediately follows her year-long residency at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (Brooklyn).
Gamaliel Rodriguez: (In)hospitable
September 30, 2023 - January 7, 2024
Gamaliel Rodriguez turns to the immediacy of his own home in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico in a series of large-scale drawings created in the past year, mostly while in residency at Colby College’s Lunder Institute. Continuing his interrogation of the Puerto Rican landscape, Rodriguez foregrounds the failure of infrastructure and alludes to a dystopic future that is the byproduct of extraction, experimentation, military occupation, and a failed project of modernization. Likewise, as this new series of drawings foregrounds, the artist’s work stems from a sustained, committed, and attentive engagement with the area which he inhabits.
Alison Hildreth: Darkness Visible
September 30, 2023 - May 6, 2024
The works on view include large-scale mixed media work on Gampi paper featuring aerial views of the earth, paired with similarly scaled oil paintings on canvas offering views of planets and other celestial bodies. The shifting perspective and media selections between the two series offer an exciting view into Hildreth’s dynamic artistic practice.
Darkness Visible is timed to coincide with a multi-venue celebration of Hildreth and her work that includes separate exhibitions at SPEEDWELL Contemporary (Portland) and New Era Gallery (Vinalhaven). The overlapping exhibitions and programs will highlight Hildreth’s remarkable career and artistic contributions spanning more than 50 years.
Shinique Smith: Continuous Poem
May 27, 2023 - January 7, 2024
Shinique Smith’s monumental, 28-foot-wide artwork, Memories of my youth streak by on the 23, captures a nostalgic remembrance of youth and the formative experiences that permeate the artist’s practice. It evokes the sentiment of gazing from her bus window witnessing the blending of storefronts and row houses while catching glimpses of her own reflection as the bus zoomed along its daily route. As viewers approach and move along the piece, they become entwined in the large, shaped mirrors that punctuate the surface, enabling them to immerse themselves in the experience of the artwork and relive the memory. The energetic brushstrokes parallel the movement of the bus, characterized by bold and expressive strokes that echo the gestural forms of action painting, graffiti, and calligraphy as the artist uses language as her vehicle toward mark making.
Accompanying works, from Smith’s 30 x 30-inch series, blend an array of disparate materials and modes of expression, offering fleeting glimpses into experiences that are both individual and universal. Each piece conjures an emotion that feels familiar but remains elusive, defying precise definition or classification. These glimpses into the artist’s recollections flatten her personal history and memories into a singular, continuous moment that collages everything that came before into the present, piece by piece heaped onto the canvas.
Rodrigo Valenzuela: WEAPONS
May 27 - September 10, 2023
Through a patina of nostalgic fantasy, Valenzuela’s Weapons series offers views of imaginative performances that might take place on a job site once workers depart. Knives, screws, rope, and chains—the tools of many trades—appear reconfigured as sinister phoenixes, ramshackle sculptures, and animistic creatures of dreams. Afterwork presents pictures of somber, silvery rooms filled with mechanical contraptions and fog, possibly from the sweat left hanging in the air after a long day’s work. Valenzuela’s works are animated by a dream-like quality and driven by an urgent human and political exploration: that of global economics and the human dimensions of labor, considered in the wake of neoliberalism.
The exhibition also pushes the bounds of photography’s materiality and, in some ways, recalls the labor intensive early days of the medium. To make these monumental works, Valenzuela assembles the found-object sculptures and the tableaux, makes and develops photographs, and then screen-prints the images onto canvases that have already been collaged with repurposed time cards and smeared with black ink. The artist’s mixed-media process is extensive and physically demanding, literally embedding his own labor amongst the broader ideas of what human labor and collective action mean to us in the post-industrial present.
Rodrigo Valenzuela: WEAPONS, installation view
Nancy Andrews: Homebodies
May 27 - September 10, 2023
The exhibition is the culminating project of an Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Fellowship.
Nancy Andrews’ first solo exhibition in her home state brings together diverse threads of her artistic practice, including drawing, collage, video, and sculpture. The questions that unite this work explore the concept of display–what is displayed in the home, how femininity is displayed in popular media, and how we look at what is displayed–and the disconnect between American ideals and actualities.
The work offers a particularly female point of view on aspirations for peace and prosperity in the home, reflecting on pervasive overtones of ownership and the desire to control women’s bodies by men who occupy dominant roles in our past and current Western culture. Similarly, Andrews’ portrayal of animals pushes against human-made boundaries by affording them subjecthood and their own, autonomous gazes. Some of the artworks in the exhibition were inspired in part by the artist’s family—her grandfather who carved birds that he mounted on felt-covered wood and her grandmother and mother who practiced a myriad of sewing and needle-based techniques to clothe the family, furnish the home, and celebrate holidays.
2023 CMCA Biennial
January 8 - May 7, 2023
The state’s largest juried exhibition, surveying new developments in contemporary art in the state of Maine, featuring works by 35 artists spanning the museum’s four galleries.
The CMCA 2023 Biennial Artists include:
Rachel Gloria Adams (Portland, ME)
Nick Benfey (New York City, NY)
Philip Brou (South Portland, ME)
Shane Charles (Bangor, ME)
Shaina Gates (Kittery, ME)
Elyse Grams (Portland, ME)
Dylan Hausthor (Waterville, ME)
Alanna Hernandez (Union, ME)
Rebecca Hutchinson (Rochester, MA)
Jenny Ibsen (Portland, ME)
Michael Kolster (Brunswick, ME)
Jared Lank (Portland, ME
Nate Luce (Rockland, ME)
Alex Lukas (Santa Barbara, CA)
Heather Lyon (Blue Hill, ME)
Dafna Maimon and Ethan Hayes-Chute (Berlin, GER)
Haley MacKeil (Providence, RI)
Mandana MacPherson and Gigi Obrecht (Freeport, ME)
Geoffrey Masland (Yarmouth, ME)
Travis Morehead (Evanston, IL)
Madeleine Morlet (Rockport, ME)
Pamela Moulton (North Bridgton, ME)
Elaine Ng (Hope, ME)
Anna Queen (Rockland, ME)
José Santiago Pérez (Chicago, IL)
Ransome (Rhinebeck, NY)
Mariah Reading (Bangor, ME)
Lynn Richardson (Swanzey, NH)
Brian Smith (Portland, ME)
Juliette Walker (Farmingdale, ME)
Holden Willard (Portland, ME)
Erin Woodbrey (South Orleans, MA)
Evelyn Wong (Portland, ME)
Ian Trask: Mind Loops
October 1, 2022 - January 8, 2023
Commissioned for CMCA. The artist’s first museum solo exhibition.
For his exhibition Mind Loops, Ian Trask premieres a new series of sculpture and installation works created with materials intercepted from the local waste stream. Emulating the critical role decomposers (like moss and fungi) play in reinvigorating natural ecosystems, Trask’s practice is a holistic system of recirculating man-made debris into remarkable artworks.
Influenced by his education and experience in the sciences, this exhibition premieres a monumental, textile-based, wall-mounted installation with suspended sculptures. His multi-component artworks rely on suspension and interconnection, resulting in a complex interplay of logic and abstraction.
Daniel Minter & Eneida Sanches: through this to that
October 1, 2022 - January 8, 2023
Daniel Minter and Eneida Sanches’ collaborative, immersive installation, through this to that explores the artists shared cultural histories as citizens of the African Diaspora in the United States and Brazil (respectively). The exhibition will take visitors on a sequential journey through an 1,800 sq ft installation featuring video projections, painting, sculpture, assemblage, large scale sculptural environments and interactive works.
Minter and Sanches focus on two interrelated axes — Transportation and Transmission. Transportation serves as a metaphor for the displacement of people over place and time, with the exhibition featuring artworks referencing ships, railways, and footsteps – mechanisms of movement that convey both involuntary and voluntary histories.
Transmission is an unpacking of the ways in which these methods of transportation have impacted lived experiences by people of the African diaspora. Shared cultural histories are embodied even across distances. Transmission moves between the human and non-human worlds including communication with plants, rocks and all natural things.
No matter where they are taken or choose to go, people of African descent are everywhere.
Elijah Ober: CALCIUM / Your Future Ex Squirrelfriend
October 1, 2022 - January 8, 2023
The artist’s first museum solo exhibition.
Elijah Ober’s solo exhibition brings together two ongoing bodies of work that center the lives of two species often regarded as pests—snails and squirrels. Ober engaging works centered on these creatures uncovers information about the lands on which we reside and the ways we utilize and relate to ecosystems and resources.
CALCIUM presents two digitally animated videos depicting snails hunting for a key shell-health supplement: calcium. Inspired by a small snail crawling up his leg while in his 3rd floor studio, Ober became fascinated by the tenacity of this small creature. Through imaginary narratives, he explores their translucence and mutability, their hermaphroditic power, and their alchemical shell building.
Your Future Ex Squirrelfriend is a collection of carved Styrofoam squirrels. While observing squirrels in his yard, Ober found in them a rich source of intrigue. He noticed their overlooked physical grace and their school-like behavior, appearing and disappearing like a hypervigilant superorganism. For Ober, these small creatures embody many dichotomies. They are brave and fierce, yet soft and small. They are cute, yet disdained by many. These sculptures show them in their most self-aware state: playful, diligent, caring, and mischievous.
Interior
October 1, 2022 - January 8, 2023
In a state known for its magnificent outdoors, this exhibition brings together works by 10 Maine-based and connected artists that explore the vast world of interior spaces. Spanning installation, painting, photography, assemblage, and printmaking, the artworks on view explore rural and urban spaces ranging from homes, historic spaces, museums, and vehicles.
Whether offering an up-close view of a countertop, taking in the intimacy, grandeur, or decline of domestic space, looking within a moving automobile, or serving as inspiration for abstraction, these artists’ works underscore the rich discoveries that can be found when we turn our attention indoors.
As we move into the fall and winter following two years of pandemic, it is invigorating to be reminded that interiors are far greater than sites of isolation and shelter, and can also inspire imagination, exploration and wonder. Artists featured in the exhibition include Matthew Brannon, Jenny Brillhart, Corinna D’Schoto, Smith Galtney, K. Min, Peter Moriarty, Carrie Schneider, Alec Soth, Gail Spaien, and Jay Stern.
Yashua Klos
May 28 - September 11, 2022
Commissioned for CMCA
Our Living is the first text-based work from the Brooklyn-based artist Yashua Klos. This monumental work expands upon his unique approach to large scale woodblock printing and collage by referencing the technique’s history as illuminated manuscript before the advent of the printing press.
In Our Living, a working collective of hands hold letter forms that are being overgrown with sprawling vines and wildflowers. The work seems to be a public announcement of Black resilience and prosperity being nurtured through communal action. In this sense, Klos also ties woodblock printing into its history as a medium for grass roots political messaging. This installation follows Klos’ first solo museum show, currently on view at the Wellin Museum of Art, entitled, Our Labour, where he highlights the invisible contribution of Black workers in building the American auto industry.
Reggie Burrows Hodges: Hawkeye
May 28 - September 11, 2022
The artist’s first museum solo exhibition. Catalog co-produced with Karma.
A tennis ball, warped by the speed of impact, is captured right before it lands on the painted boundary of the court. Its oblong shape is conveyed through negative space—a window into the black ground with which Hodges treats his canvases. This is movement as observed by a Hawk-Eye, as it lives in the paintings of Reggie Burrows Hodges: an opening, through which a series of dynamic works emerge.
The movement of the tennis ball becomes a child’s cannonball dive into a pool, and the objective record of a sporting event is transposed into the landscape of memory. The black ground, which had been contained in the ball depicted in Fault (2021), Wide (2021), and Hawkeye: Pink and Green (2019) is released into the atmosphere of memory paintings, framing scenes sourced from Hodges’s childhood in 1970’s Compton, California. For Hodges, the dissension between the mechanistic documentation of an event and the personal gaze upon the past is never settled, but like his subject matter, is suspended in motion.
Modalities of memory and surveillance tumble over one another in Hawkeye. Hodges’s series relates the huddled referees, conferring an event to a mother’s keen watchfulness over her child. He builds a grammar of tiled floors, wallpaper and tennis courts, a patterned robe and sports uniforms: forms are affected loosely, dancing with the evidence of their brush work in the presence of blackness. Hodges preserves the multiplicity of his subject matter by applying a light touch to snap shots of the past, rendering them hazy and indistinct. Meanings are entangled, tense with forces of personal memory. Hodges grasps with this momentum and guides it into the gentle, profound collisions which ripple through this work.
Reggie Burrows Hodges, Melba 77, 2021, acrylic and pastel on linen
The View from Here: CMCA at 70
May 28 - September 11, 2022
CMCA presented the thematic group exhibition, The View from Here, featuring works by 20 artists (including two collaboratives) who have previously exhibited or otherwise been involved at CMCA across our history (1952-2022). The celebratory exhibition coincides with CMCA’s 70th anniversary, and the unifying concept is unique and dynamic ways of looking at the world through new or recent works, underscoring CMCA’s forward-thinking trajectory. Artists include: Katherine Bradford, Sam Cady, Ann Craven, Lois Dodd, Inka Essenhigh, Linden Frederick, Alison Hildreth, Hilary Irons, Erin Johnson, Alex Katz, John Moore, Tessa Green O’Brien, Wade Kavanaugh & Stephen Nguyen, Probably Joel, Aaron T Stephan, tectonic industries, Joyce Tenneson, and Nicole Wittenberg.
Katherine Bradford (left) and Linden Frederick (right).
Nicola López: Visions, Phantoms, and Apparitions
January 29, - May 8, 2022
Nicola López’s solo exhibition featured a monumental mixed media installation accompanied by three related bodies of work that collectively reference three timeframes – past, present and future – as reflected through the lens of climate change and the built world. López’s works in the exhibition exist somewhere between hopes and apprehensions, depicting human-built structures that are strange, beautiful, ominous, and even impossible. The artist’s installation work, Barren Lands Breed Strange Visions, is composed of woodcut, monotype and silkscreen on mylar and measures 10 feet high x 29 feet long.
Walk the Line
January 29 - May 8, 2022
Walk the Line featured an exceptionally diverse range of works by eight Maine and Maine-connected artists who share a central use of linear or geometric forms in their compositions. Seen together, these artists underscore the expressive power of the line through works that span assemblage, photography, textile, painting, printmaking, sculpture, and artist books. Artists featured in the exhibition include Paolo Arao, Grace DeGennaro, Clint Fulkerson, John Houck, Jennie C. Jones, Jeff Kellar, Paula McCartney, and Will Sears.
Chris Doyle: The Fabricators
January 29 - May 8, 2022
Chris Doyle’s exhibition premiers an installation of his 2021 digital animation, The Fabricators, featuring a 48-foot-long video projection on an artist designed screen. The exhibition is accompanied by two preparatory drawings for the animation.
The Fabricators features a group of related machines locked in loops of perpetual labor. Products, by-products, and waste are transported through conduits that weave through the space of the animation. Because the figures and gestures of the system appear anthropomorphic, one can’t help but look at the elements that make up The Fabricators and wonder about the future of human activity as the majority of production is transferred from man to machine.
Young Sun Han: Passages from a Memoir + Tourist in the Dark
January 29 - May 8, 2022
Arising out of research into family narratives and grassroots peace movements on Jeju Island, Young Sun Han‘s text and photo-based installations respond to consequences of war and migration in North and South Korea. Through research and travel – mining memoir, oral histories, articles, travel brochures, and forbidden photographs – Han’s installation examines stories of the Korean diaspora.
Spatial Relations
October 1, 2021 - January 9, 2022
This exhibition brings together recent sculptures by Elizabeth Atterbury, Gordon Hall, and Anna Hepler. Each piece engages the architecture directly, touching the floor and walls– leaning, resting, standing, draping. Ranging from re-creations of recognizable things to abstract forms, these sculptures interrogate the potential for objects to affect us emotionally, socially, and physically.
Each working within their own purview, these three artists share a commitment to creating spare works with simple materials including wood, ceramic, metal, concrete, cardboard, and paper. Each employs color as an integral component, ranging from paint and pigment to colored pencil and stain.
The term spatial relations refers to how an object is located in space in reference to another object, along with the charged space between them. Here, it is deployed to describe not only the variety of physical and conceptual relationships between the works in this exhibition, but also the evolving conversation among these three artists.
Spatial Relations, installation view
Ryan Adams: Lessons
October 1, 2021 - January 9, 2022
Ryan Adams’ signature, gem-style murals, paintings, and prints display a geometric deconstruction of letterforms using shadow and highlights to create dynamic visual depth, complexity, and movement.
The focal point of the exhibition is Adams’ 33-foot-long mural, Switch the Code. The title refers to the practice of code-switching, where individuals purposefully change their speech, behavior, and/or appearance to be seen outside of stereotypical assumptions and accepted within a majority culture.
This experience is embodied in the phrase, “Use Your (White) Voice,” that rises from the mural’s vibrant, multi-hued networks of shapes. It’s important to note that Adams has left the word “White” embedded within the mural’s matrix in order to encourage viewers to identify their own experience with code-switching and empower them to embrace their authentic selves.
Adams’ mural was created with latex paint embellished with short bursts of black and white spray paint in order to highlight aspects of the phrase. Switch the Code is accompanied by a series of new paintings that continue Adams’ lessons theme and were created during recent residencies at Hewnoaks Artist Colony and Indigo Arts Alliance.
Into Action
October 1, 2021 - January 9, 2022
This thematic exhibition features photographic works set in nature that document actions as they naturally occurred; actions as they were performed for the camera; interactions created in post-production; or to propose actions to be taken by the viewer. The exhibition will feature installation-based works by Cig Harvey, Shoshannah White, and Julie Poitras Santos along with more traditionally formatted works by Jennifer Calivas, Mark Dorf, and Ray Ewing.
Hiraki Sawa: Absent
October 1, 2021 - January 9, 2022
This solo exhibition presents the internationally acclaimed video artist Hiraki Sawa’s most recent single-channel video, Absent (2018). Absent (running time 4:27 minutes) presents an intimate, imaginative space populated by a fantastic parade of surreal creatures—a walking tea kettle, a dancing cup, a flying spoon—all of them traveling between grand and intimate landscapes.
Matterport view of CMCA’s galleries