FREE FOR ALL:
An unjuried salon-style show

Wednesday, December 5 - Friday, December 20
Opening Reception: Friday, December 7


SPACE Gallery opens its doors and invites you to exhibit your work in a salon-style survey show.  FREE FOR ALL is both a curatorial experiment and a democratic effort to organize and present work. This is an open call with no submission fee.  It’s a free for all.

Artwork Pick Up Dates:

Thursday 12/20, 4:00-6:00 PM
Friday 12/21, 12:00-6:00 PM

Wednesday 12/26: 4:00-6:00 PM
Thursday 12/27: 4:00-6:00 PM
Friday 12/28: 4:00-6:00 PM

Questions? Contact Elizabeth Atterbury: elizabeth@space538.org, (207)828-5600

Ken Gonzales-Day: The Wonder Gaze

Friday, October 5 - Friday, November 16
Opening Reception: Friday, October 5
Artist's Lecture: Thursday, October 18, 7pm, $5

SPACE Gallery is pleased to announce Ken Gonzales-Day: The Wonder Gaze, an exhibition of photographs by the Los Angeles based artist. The work on view developed out of Gonzales-Day’s examination into the history of lynching in California, a largely unknown chapter of the American West. The Wonder Gaze
is scheduled in conjunction with the 2007 Human Rights Watch International Traveling Film Festival, a weeklong series of fi lms and discussions, which SPACE has hosted six times.

While researching the omission of Latinos in California’s published histories, Gonzales-Day discovered a considerable number of names mentioned in documents associated with lynching. Sorting through newspapers, court records, periodicals, fi rst hand accounts, historical photographs and souvenir postcards, he began to uncover a hidden legacy of lynching in California. Gonzales-Day
identifi ed over 350 separate occurrences of lynching in the state, a number that was previously cited at 50. What results is a powerful union of artistic practice
and scholarly research: the work on view and Gonzales-Day’s highly praised book, Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 (Duke University Press, 2006), a study that not only updates the historical record and substantiates the prevalence of racially motivated crimes in frontier justice but also addresses ideas of erasure, spectatorship, and degrees of accountability. The term “wonder gaze,” which Gonzales-Day elaborates on his book, comes from a newspaper article summarizing the execution of two Mexican men in 1854. Describing the scene, the ournalist wrote: “Their bodies are now swinging to the limb where they were executed, and will probably continue to boast the wonder gaze of the public until time and decomposition shall allow them to fall to pieces.” For Gonzales-Day, the “wonder gaze” invokes, perhaps, the most disturbing aspect of lynching practices: the
necessary presence of an audience, as event spectators, participants, and even as consumers.

The Wonder Gaze includes a series of digitally altered souvenir lynching postcards, several large-format color
photographs of oak trees, taken by the artist, and a site-specifi c, full scale wallpaper installation of a historic lynching image. Whereas the original historic lynching postcards gratuitously displayed the victims bodies, Gonzales-Day has chosen to remove them, leaving everything else unchanged, shifting the focus from the original spectacle and object of shame to the crowd in attendance. The color photographs of oak trees come from the series Hang Trees, which Gonzales-Day shot over a fi ve year period as he retraced the steps of lynch mobs and vigilance committees, visiting nearly every
county in California in search of these landmarks.

Images (top to bottom):
Run Up, 2002, 40 x 50 inches, Chromogenic print
Erased Lynching Series, 2004-2007, 6x4”, Chromogenic print mounted on card stock

SPECIAL THANKS to Portland Color for printing the wallpaper installation.

New Projections + Installations by
The Portland Film + Video Artists Collective

Wednesday September 5 - Thursday, September 27
Opening Reception: Friday, September 7, 2007

Artists include Sydney and Keith Fitzgerald, Ling-Wen Tsai, Stefanie Loeb, Betsy Nelson, Peter Shellenberger, Kenneth White, and Deborah Wing-Sproul. Their works utilize film and video in combination with painting, performance, fabric, and large-format photography, to expand our understanding of moving images.

Sydney and Keith Fitzgerald present an experimental Super 8 tour around Mackworth Island in “Yslaneyd.” Ling-Wen Tsai, in collaboration with composer Nathan Kolosko, present “Water & Wind: Water Bugs,” a new video in their on-going exploration of invisible elemental energies. Stefanie Loeb’s “Cotton and Silk” uses film and cloth garments to address the materials’ transformation over time. Using Super 8 projection, painting, and performance, Betsy Nelson addresses the currently fashionable convergence of feminism and domesticity in “Domestic Fowl: Birds Kept for their Eggs and Flesh.” The flammability of celluloid film is the focus of Peter Shellenberger’s “Fool Render Dust,” a projection of the B – Monster Movie War of the Colossal Beast, continuously looped until the film’s disintegration. “Directions of Encounter” by Kenneth White explores the pliability of time and place in quintessential Maine Coast imagery using video projection on to large-format transparent DURAclear prints from Super 8. Deborah Wing-Sproul presents her new performance-based video “Tidal Culture, Part II: Newfoundland, Latitude 49.42N / Longitude 54.45W,” the latest work in her on-going address of impermanence in environmental and cultural conditions.

The Portland Film + Video Artists Collective (PFVAC) formed in July 2006. It is committed to the advancement of film and video as personal, experimental art forms in Greater Portland. Celebration and preservation of creative freedom is paramount in all its actions. This is the Collective’s fourth event: the previous three were held at Zero Station, Portland, Maine, and included “Premiere Showcase” (October 2006), “Peter Gruner Shellenberger Retrospective” (March 2007), and the “Portland – Syracuse One Take Super 8 Event” with visiting artist Brett Kashmere (April 2007).

Images (top to bottom):
Deborah Wing-Sproul, Tidal Culture Part II: Newfoundland Latitude 49.42N / Longitude 54.45W, 2007, 60 minutes, single channel HD DVD video
Ling-Wen Tsai, Water & Wind: Water Bugs, 2007, single channel video
Kenneth White, Directions of Encounter, 2007, six 36 x 49 light jet prints of Super 8 frames on DURAclear, looped video projection of Super 8

Powerlines
by Kate Hourihan

Tuesday August 14- Wednesday, August 99.

Artist's Statement:
With this video project, I am most interested in exploring new ways of conveying an idea or experience as a narrative. In particular, the
idea behind the animation comes from ordinary road travel. We spend countless hours driving in cars, passing through the landscape. Some things we pass are still, while others move incongruously to the motion of our cars. For the passenger, the experience of road travel is a very linear process; you pass one house, then after a few telephone poles there is a stopsign, a few telephone poles later there is something new for you to experience.

The video allows the viewer to experience each action as it happens. The drawing allows the viewer to see the entire sequence of events after they happen. The drawing is a roadmap of the animation, illustrating how the animation itself was made. The drawing acts as the landscape through which the camera passed, documenting each event as it unfolded.

Right:
Powerlines (DETAIL), drawing on panel, video

A TIME AND A PLACE

Thursday July 5 - Thursday, August 9.
Opening reception Friday, July 6, 5:00 – 8:00 pm

Gallery Hours Tues - Sat 12 - 6 pm

http://www.alexandercheves.com/
http://www.lisadahlstudio.com/
http://www.hotironpress.com/kylebravo.htm

Home is a place of safety, comfort and status, but for some a site of darker associations. During childhood, idealized drawings and paintings of home constitute some of our first forays into visual art, revealing conceptions of life's most basic elements - family, security, and connection. In "A Time and A Place,” Alexander Cheves, Lisa Dahl and Kyle Bravo each present their views of home with a captivating surface beauty. The colors, shapes and textures draw us in, then slowly, more foreboding overtones emerge. The houses are broken, fractured or inaccessible, yet the paintings, prints and sculptures have a dreamy, childlike optimism.

Alexander Cheves’ brightly colored poetic paintings and sculptures are derived from the landscape, hills and architecture of central valley California. Working from materials that are used to build and paint houses such as wood, plaster, concrete, and steel, Cheves takes us on a dream journey to a place and a time that is familiar but distant. Houses are turned on their side, merged together and floating in a brilliant sky.

Lisa Dahl uses the Suburban Home as a metaphor for the American Dream and its discontents. In her series of paintings There Goes My Neighborhood, Dahl paints layers of bright colors atop images of houses in real estate magazines and photographs she has taken.  The houses stand out from their natural settings and turn this one-time symbol of comfort, warmth and stability into a closed off, cold place with no entrance or exit.

Kyle Bravo’s eight silkscreens were created from collaged photographs of houses in the ninth ward that he photographed after Hurricane Katrina. Bravo’s studio was in this section and he lost most of his artwork and equipment during the floods. He describes the process of making these pieces as “his own reconstruction effort. Salvaging the broken pieces of people’s homes and lives and reclaiming a place and a purpose for them.”

For more information, please contact SPACE Gallery Executive Director Nat May, nat@space538.org or at 828-5600

Right top:
Alexander Cheves, Gone with and Away with

Right middle:
Lisa Dahl, CERULEAN BLUE II, 2006, acrylic and laser print on Rives BFK paper, 30" x 44"

Right bottom:
Kyle Bravo, Yellow House Conglomeration, silkscreen on Rives BFK paper, 22" x 22"

CLEARANCE: The Four Horseman
by Greta Bank

Thursday June 28 - Thursday, August 9.
Opening reception Friday, July 6, 5:00 – 8:00 pm

Clearance: The Four Horsemen was inspired by mankind’s path of destruction. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The False Leader, War, Famine and Plague are individually showcased within antique giltwood chairs  accompanied by matching upholstered panels. Nearly fifty separate narratives flood the panels’ Baroque patterning, using scatological metaphor taken from topical events and problems that threaten our existence. Classical iconography, merged with popular culture, plays out a number of sad truths.

In popular culture we gravitate towards style and statement to define our personalities. Democracy and consumerism allow visual language to reinvent status and class.  A carefully planned interior or the right pair of shoes can satisfy a particular sense of accomplishment, or helps negotiate social and economic constraints. People can display their existential definitions through their subtle language of personal statements.

The absurdity of human nature is rooted in the abuse of ‘otherness’. The universal struggle to define an authentic existence alienates us from all things and people we don’t immediately relate to. Our fear and lack of understanding provokes violence and hatred.  This happens between habitats, neighborhoods, nations, industries and economies. Without adaptation to a swarming dominance, there is the threat of eventual extinction; be they spiders, frogs, whales, estranged family, strange neighbors, strange skin, strange clothes, strange voices or strange gods.

This project was made possible with the generous support of the Maine Arts Commission.

Right:
CLEARANCE: The Four Horsemen (DETAIL), 19th century giltwood armchairs, Vinyl, foam, paint and permanent marker, 8’ x 14’8” x 32”, 2007

Tuesday May 22 - Thursday, June 21.
Opening reception Friday, June 1, 5:00 – 8:00 pm

Gallery Hours Tues - Sat 12 - 6 pm

http://www.bradleywester.com
http://www.elizabethduffy.net

Common stationery-store labels, stickers, and burst signs have been a primary source of imagery in Bradley Wester’s work. Using painting, collage, and digital technology, the labels are transformed into abstract images that reference a diversity of icons— from the modernist grid to computer circuitry, from the Italian Baroque to Japanese Anime. The work blurs the line between ‘dumb’ and ‘high-tech’ information architectures, between ‘low’ and ‘fine’ art. When Wester’s early drawing/collages, using actual paper labels, began to mimic the look and geometry of computer circuit boards, he was inspired to enlist real computer circuitry to ‘re-draw’ the label and sticker designs as digital files: the paper label, a low-tech information architecture, mimicking circuitry, a hi-tech information architecture, which in turn mimics the original paper label—full circle.

Elizabeth Duffy’s work resurfaces themes of transience and transformation, using objects and drawings made with labor-intensive methods. Her sources are the overlooked remnants of things we use in our daily routines. Business envelopes, cleaning products, lint, straws and office supplies are accumulated and manipulated to bring out their alternate lives and to draw attention to what we use and discard.

Right top:
Bradley Wester, die another day, 2003, digital print, 52x36 inches

Right bottom:
Elizabeth Duffy, Envelope Drawing (detail), 2004,
Pencil and colored pencil on envelopes and wall, dimensions variable

The Story House Project

Tuesday May 8 - Friday, May 11.
12 - 6 pm

Opening reception Tuedsday, May 8,
6:30 – 8:30 pm, $5 sug. donation, All ages

The Telling Room, Greater Portland’s non-profit writing center, presents The Story House Project: 15 local teenagers and their 15 amazing stories of coming to America in a multi-media exhibit. Teenagers from Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran, and Iraq have worked with some of Maine’s finest writers and students from the “Arts for Social Change” class at The Maine College of Art to share their tales of exile and hope during their long journeys to America. The Story House Project celebrates and honors these stories, in three dimensions, by providing actual homes for them. An accompanying anthology of the stories will be available for $5.

http://tellingroom.org/

Rural Vernacular

January 5 - February 22, 2007
Opening reception Friday, Jan. 5, 5:00 – 8:00 pm

Gallery Hours: Tues - Sat 12 - 6 pm

The rural vernacular is a complex plurality, a language that is rapidly being altered by suburban encroachment, development, and preservation. The rhythms of forests, plains, hollows, hillsides, and long dirt roads form a basic grammar while a regional rural patois is forged through variations in human interaction with the land. The work exhibited in Rural Vernacular--maps, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and videos--are inspired experiences in rural environments. Concerns of poverty, identity, land usage, isolation, and natural forces share common ground with issues of home, place, routine, labor and leisure. With work by Brad Birchett, Cat Clifford, A. Jacob Galle, Sarah Gamble, Heather Gray, Lydia Moyer, Abby Sadauckas and Jeff Whetstone.

Curated by A. Jacob Galle

Right top:
Jeff Whetstone, Circles Over Ages, 2005, silver gelatin photograph, 24”x24”

Right bottom:
Lydia Moyer, Blood Rain, 2005, still from digital video loop, running time: 1:45