Karlee Cutler is a self-taught Acrylic Pouring and Fluid Artist. Her passion for bright and bold colors and fluid art was influenced by other Acrylic pouring artists. In late 2019, Karlee began creating her own custom art work to showcase her talent.

Both Players Move, featuring Salidas y Entradas / Exits and Entrances (2018) and Le Survivant (The Survivor) (2020), marks yet another collaborative exhibition between contemporary peers at SPACE. This time between Jessica Hankey and Erin Johnson, two artists who blend theatricality and sight-specific video to blur the boundaries between individual lives and sociopolitical realities. Hankey and Jonhson have been artistic and curatorial collaborators since graduate school, with highlighted works including the curatorial vision behind 2016’s An Ocean Trapped Behind a Wall (University of New Mexico) and 2018’s video installation, Salidas y Entradas / Exits and Entrances (Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, El Paso, TX). Living in Maine at one time or another, Hankey and Jonhson are also both past Kindling Fund grantees, a statewide regranting program administered by SPACE, on behalf of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. In Both Players Move, we find the tension between fact and fiction reimagined. Through a proliferation of imagery comes an instability of representation; communicating truth becomes a balance of rehearsal, improvisation, and performance whether the act is fantastic and imaginative or of habitual norm. In Salidas y Entradas / Exits and Entrances, seniors in El Paso, Texas use the hallways, auditoriums, and kitchens of city-run senior recreation centers as a stage to explore acting and improvisation. To make the film, artists Jessica Hankey and Erin Johnson brought in a theatre director and created a series of performance workshops. With the senior center’s institutional spaces as stand-ins for the rest of the world, the senior actors use the workshops to improvise scenes for the camera that explore social and political imaginaries. Salidas is a layered film that combines documentary footage of recreational activities at the senior centers (bingo, line dancing, water aerobics) with fictional, improvised scenes that range from comic send-ups of television melodrama, to uncannily realistic encounters with authorities such as an unyielding traffic cop and an unsympathetic bank teller. Themes emerge such as gender as performance, the role of musical storytelling as a soundtrack to daily life, and the dynamics of the U.S.- Mexico border. As the boundaries between rehearsal, improvisation, and performance blur, the ways in which individual lives and sociopolitical realities merge together are foregrounded. Jessica Hankey’s single-channel video installation Le Survivant (the Survivor) (2020) looks at the 1979 record sale of William Nelson Copley’s collection of Surrealist art through the lens of former sex worker Marjorie Annapav, who married Copley a year after the auction in exchange for $600,000. Through a nonlinear, looping narrative that reverberates with intimacy and distance, the short film at the center of the project follows Annapav as she works with a performance coach to develop a one-woman show about her life. Objects and wall pieces draw from the visual vocabularies of works in Copley’s collection. Le Survivant highlights paradoxes of value—the worth ascribed to precious works of art, to erotic intimacies, and to human beings across a lifespan.

The work is a play of foreground and background, using simple texture and pattern.

Grant Wahlquist Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition featuring works by Tad Beck (Vinalhaven, ME), Joe Mama-Nitzberg (Catskill, NY), Kyle Patnaude (Portland, ME), Marc Swanson (Catskill, NY), and George Dureau. The show will run from February 7 - March 21, 2020. An opening reception will occur on Friday, February 7 from 5 - 8 pm.

A glass exhibition not to be missed! Joseph Webster, an emerging glass artist, owns and operates a glassblowing studio in Biddeford, Maine. Joseph’s works are highly regarded for his high level of craft and technical prowess. His exhibition will be comprised of a wide breadth of his sculptural design work as well as showcasing a new series of colored tableware, bar ware, and centerpieces. Maine Craft Portland is proud to open this month long exhibition just in time for unique Valentine's Day offerings.

"The Maine landscape is powerful, mysterious and beautiful. I have painted it for years, usually outdoors on location. I am still coming to grips with it."

“I have been exploring realist painting as a way to articulate what interests me visually and emotionally about my experiences and surroundings. My hope, my intention, is to respond to the elusive characteristics of the medium in a way that is true to the elusive qualities of everything, the complexity of forms in nature, human or otherwise, or the ephemeral quality of light on a wave on the beach, for example. There is only so much our eyes and mind and heart can take in. With that truth, my challenge is to not be too explicit with the paint, but strive to imply atmosphere and mood rather describe it.” Born and raised in Portland, ME, Paul Brahms began painting in his early teen years, studying the works in galleries such as the former Barridoff gallery, where he saw the work of Alfred Chadbourn, Joseph Nicoletti, Robert Solotaire and others. In high school he was able to focus on painting, including visits to Alfred Chadbourn’s studio for lessons. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1986, and subsequently worked in New York City, Italy, France, but always returning to Maine. In Portland he worked with the muralist, sign painter, illustrator and architectural historian/designer Tony Taylor where he acquired a practical knowledge of mural painting and commercial art processes. He also spent many years teaching art in continuing education programs. His fine art is inspired by the tradition of American realists, with an interest in the drama of the landscape, romantic light, painterly brushwork and an earth tone palette. Mixed with this comfortable and familiar language and subject matter is a desire to rethink this language and question the automatic reliance on beauty as artistic goal. Exhibition runs February 6 – May 2, 2020

Reggie Burrows Hodges is a narrative figurative painter whose work centers around visual metaphor and storytelling. He works primarily large-scale on raw canvas, wood and rag paper with acrylic and pastel — exploring themes such as identity, truth, surveillance, and often childhood memories. As method, Hodges paints from a black ground, developing the environment around the figure so it emerges from its surroundings, examining the possibility that we are all products of our environment. Hodges attended the University of Kansas studying theatre and film. He is currently an adjunct professor at the Maine College of Art teaching Cinematic Storytelling, Character Design and Professional Studio Development in Animation and Game Arts. Hodges has been the recipient of numerous artist residencies including the Ellis- Beauregard Foundation, Stephen Pace House and Monson Arts.