Adrienne counts water as a major inspiration for her work. Her complex monoprints suggest the element in the palette of colors and painterly application of ink. By repeatedly folding the paper and running it through the press, sharply delineated areas remain unprinted, and result in strong horizontals, verticals and diagonals. This interplay of continuation and disruption through repeated passes results in overlapping, and ever-new combinations of colors. It also makes the prints’ overarching concept architectonic as the folding causes some planes to advance, others to recede — adding a shallow third dimension to the paper, not unlike the waves of water. It becomes complicated when this physical, spatial aspect of the images reinforces, ignores, or even contradicts spatial illusion caused by the color scheme.

Sader’s fascinating images are inspired by the beaches, dunes and marshes of Cape Cod. Using the same built-up plate with varying inks and displaying the resulting collagraphs at varying orientations, the very same image is taken through an amazing array of subtle differences that actually have strong visual effects. Being closest to landscape, they read either as aerial views of a tidal area or as cellular growth as seen through a microscope. Either abstract line work is foregrounded, or grass and dunes of sand. The prints’ surface is layered with inks, becoming tactile, almost appropriately topographical.

In Whitten’s monoprints, it is individual letters, complete or in fragments, that spill over the sheets of paper, like a torrent of language. Through use of various type fonts, sizes and colors, they are printed in layers: overlapping and touching each other in larger dynamic forms. Letters trickle down from the menacingly dark upper half of “FYI,” while being sucked into the white, gaping hole at the center of “?” in convincing suggestions of movement. While individual letters may be recognized, colorful play is paramount.

Both Adrienne and Sader are expertly pushing their medium to the point of mystery. Although we can intellectually understand their processes, specifics and sequential order remain enigmatic, and often awe-inspiring. The resulting images possess multi-layered surfaces that are luscious and viscerally evocative. While intriguing for their color harmonies and suggestive compositions, Whitten’s stamped accumulations in comparison lack such visual intrigue. They are flat, without visible material accretions that might ask the eye to linger, are more graphic and truly two-dimensional. Language being the subject and medium, one might also be justified to expect a conceptual angle to the work. It is entirely up to the viewer to supply such angle. To me, the work suggests a flow of thoughts and also becomes a visualization of the daily deluge of information that we are exposed to.

United by the process of monoprinting, Adrienne, Sader and Whitten use that medium to greatly differing effects — from the suggestion of land formations and the abstraction of the element of water, to the most culturally codified abstraction there is, language. Yet all three supply us with ample occasions to wonder, think and enjoy.

Britta Konau can be reached at bkonau@gmail.com.

“Ripple Effect: Monoprints by Karen Adrienne, Kris Sader, and Barbra Whitten” | through May 30 | at the PhoPa Gallery, 132 Washington Ave., Portland | 207. 517.0200 | phopagallery.com

Store windows act as physical and psychological barriers, separating you from what you ostensibly desire and admire. Dioramas, literally meaning "through that which is seen," are distancing devices too, allowing for only an indirect relationship of viewership, often through glass. Designed for frontal, exclusionary viewing, they relate environmental habitats or historical events, including battles, as authoritative narratives. Early-19th-century paper theaters include a stage set and cutout characters to be manipulated.

One does not need to know of these precedents and influences to thoroughly enjoy and grasp the Duennebier’s “Battle for the Sweetlands,” but it helps realizing how smartly they have combined aspects of these cultural expressions. One also does not need to know that the installation elaborates on an earlier narrative project by Caitlin Duennebier, which involved settlers in an invented land. The obscurity of the underlying story actually helps to stir viewers’ own imagination. Each window panel contains an enclosed diorama of multiple layers of scenery. The central and largest one is titled “Massacre near Gumdrop Mountain.”

Two groups of men and women, some riding what are probably meant to be horses but could equally well be mythical beings, are bitterly engaged in armed battle. Although all characters have bare upper torsos, the only unequivocal gender identification is caricatured hairstyles: if you have long hair you’re a woman; crewcut, you’re a man. The deadly combat takes place amongst rolling hills with red, dead trees encroaching from the sides like flames of destruction and tongues of blue and gray vegetation reaching up from below. On the horizon looms a pink heap of candies like the true, promised land worth fighting for. How’s that for sugarcoating war? Here’s the world we live in (and fight and die in) and there the world we pine for — sweet, sticky, seductive — as in all the wonderful goods in shop windows we are led to believe we crave like we crave sugar.

The smaller diorama on the left features gigantic, blood-gorged ticks underground. Above, an encampment of orange tents is enclosed by a night sky that features a constellation of a fighting man and woman on horseback. In the right diorama night is fantastically suggested by menacing, black vegetation and a silver backdrop. Listening to a woman speak, a group of people are gathered around a campfire (which is suggestively illuminated by a flickering light at night). There’s a great sense of forlornness about this gathering, so small in this dark universe, and of a saga of mythical proportions being relayed.

The installation is clearly the work of two people. Caitlin’s figures are linear, cartoonish, with pronounced noses à la Jim Nutt, and a bit sloppily executed, which gives them freshness and liveliness. Nicole’s scenery is pretty spectacular, very imaginative, and makes great use of just paper, ink, and paint.

Like any traditionally composed narrative, this one has a beginning, middle, and end. It suggests a narrative progression from the night before in which the clash is prefigured in the stars, to the battle itself, and a later night, when life gets turned into narrative, or in this case, story into meta-story. The Duennebier’s installation wonderfully attests to the persistence of narrativity in contemporary art, which requires the figure, in whatever form. “Battle for the Sweetlands” is an imaginative contemporary version of Bosch’s and Breughel’s follies of mankind, mixed with the narrative and formal repertoire of Darger and Cornell. It tells the sad and endless story of greed and of fighting for the wrong thing—the thing without nutritional value, spiritually, emotionally, and communally speaking—but with a refreshing sense of humor. Most importantly, the work is out there, on the street, in a format and venue accessible to all.

Britta Konau can be reached at bkonau@gmail.com.

“Nicole and Caitlin Duennebier: Battle for the Sweetlands” through July 4 | window of SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St., Portland | 207.828.5600 | space538.org

While Davis is the more committed and adventurous of the two, Wilson too is taking considerable risks and succeeding. She has always been painting alongside a professional career and several of her palette knife landscapes are included in the show. The painting “Awaken” is an outlier, though, as it combines concentric fields of color with swarms of arrows. Yet, because it evokes a meteorological chart of air currents it still relates to the huge skies of the landscapes, alive with moving clouds and changing light.

Wilson’s recent launch into three dimensions may seem like a drastic change, but there’s continuity, too. Her wall-based assemblages of found objects and natural materials are like paintings coming off the wall. They extend the tactility of her richly-worked canvases and retain their coloristic element as well. Wooden cigar molds in “Euphonious” provide a repetition of positive and negative forms that is just slightly touched with paint to create warm and cool rhythms. The symmetry of “Equipoise” above it is subtly undermined by a striped ball turned 90 degrees. The artist’s interventions are often minimal but carefully considered. Composition and color remain her painterly domain. Wilson’s most graphic and powerfully evocative pieces, displayed together, also possess great narrative potential. “Soft Spoken” layers wooden circles and radiating spokes. “Jostle,” displayed underneath, frames two columns of short pieces of wood. Both pieces are painted a warm yellow with light blue highlights. Their combination suggests parched bones shimmering in the glare of the sun’s heat.

Davis’s work continues to be inspired by the complexities of maps but its focus is expanding and shifting away from structural and conceptual aspects of maps. Now their dynamic energy in the form of fluid essences, streams of information and inherent movements are the focus. In addition to material layering, more prominent processes are now side-by-side existence, extraction and condensation into energetic lines. The color red, however, still dominates most of the works with its associations of blood and anger, but also love and seduction. In “river, flows,” made of crocheted, shiny red wire, it suggests a flow of possibly menstrual blood, slowing down, pooling in places, and speeding up in others, like the variegated flow of time and life.

Reconfigured maps are the basis of two of Davis’s strongest works in the show. An old social science map of Europe underlies “another bloom.” Relocated countries free up space for a pinned cluster of red mesh pouches. Possible interpretations for them range from empty bait bags and blossoms, as the title suggests, to drops of blood shed in territorial wars with each map pin affixing a pouch indicating the location of a battle. In “Sicilia,” knotted threads in daffodil yellow and light teal simultaneously mend the map of Italy and hold its landmasses together, and also brutally displace them. The Mediterranean Sea has been replaced by wave after wave of blue and white clothing tags, spelling out sizes like so many depth readings. Geography being dug up and woven back together, the whole piece buckles under the movement of earth and water.

Davis’s work never fails to surprise and intrigue. It is always captivatingly complex, full of intensity and release. There’s never just a straight line; there’s revisiting, like crocheting, turning back on itself before proceeding, always complicated by ebb and flow, to arrive at works that are powerful in their suggestive scope and openness.

Both Wilson and Davis impress with their willingness to press ahead in continued exploration, navigating their current positions without the help of a map. In this recent work both artists have become more playful but also more elemental, accessing deep sources within without losing sight of universals.

Britta Konau can be reached at bkonau@gmail.com.

“Of Breath and Bone: Works by Cynthia Davis and Ronnie Wilson” through June 26 | at the 3-Fish Gallery, 377 Cumberland Ave., Portland | 207.773.4773

The PMA invited Ferris to organize its ninth Biennial as part of the museum’s mission to present a cohesive narrative of contemporary Maine art to its audiences.

Ferris is currently the curator of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis., where she has organized several exhibitions, including “the kids are all right: an exhibition about family and photography” (2013), “Material Fix” (2015) and “Photography and the Scientific Spirit” opening this fall. Ferris has lived in Maine for 20 years and spends most of the calendar here, with about six weeks away in Wisconsin. Ferris previously served as curator at Bowdoin College Museum of Art for 12 years, followed by a position as assistant director of the Maine Arts Commission.

I asked Ferris what type of art experience visitors to the Biennial should expect.

“I tried very hard to make it as varied as I possibly could, in terms of (the artists’) age, where they lived, their art background, the materials,” she said. “Hopefully, everybody will find at least one thing they fall in love with, from the baskets to Renaissance-inspired oil paintings.” Her scope included the baskets made by Jeremy Frey, George Neptune, Theresa Secord and Sarah Sockbeson and the oil on linen by Brett Bigbee called “Josie Over Time” (2011-2015).

Ferris is looking to correct local ignorance of creators like Frey, an accomplished artist with work in the Smithsonian “that nobody in Maine knows about. He’s nationally recognized in the American Indian world, making baskets in the same tradition for 12,000 years.”

Around the corner, an exhibit of a much newer type takes shape when visitors to the PMA lie down on their backs on yoga mats and take in the four films that Dr. Owen F. Smith created while waiting for inspiration. He stopped filming each time his artistic light bulb flashed.

A professor at the University of Maine at Orono for 25 years, Smith has spent much of that time developing the newly opened Innovative Media Research and Commercialization Center. He works in new media, or intermedia, “a term that came out of artist/writer Dick Higgins,” Smith explained. “He saw a lot of people who worked with multiple media and varying formats, saying creative work happens in the space between things — for example, combining things like dance and sculpture (and other) hybrid forms that have developed over the last 30 years or so.”

College art students are more media savvy these days, to be sure, but Smith is impressed with the consistency of caliber he’s encountered over the years.

“Even 10 years ago, you could see a difference between those with digital backgrounds and those without. That baseline is now a given,” he said, noting that UMaine draws as much as 60 percent of its students from in state. “I’ve been really impressed by the quality and curiosity of students I’ve had a chance to interact with.”

Ferris is similarly taken with Smith’s work, and the way he combines the old and slower artistic method, with new tools.

“There are two things I notice that are profound and beautiful,” Ferris said of Smith’s “Dreaming of Possibilities.” “The creative process is very evident, and that’s really the theme of the entire exhibit. And he is illustrating that the creative process requires you to slow down and get lost in your thoughts. You need considered time and space, peace and quiet. At the same time, he’s using new media to suggest to us to slow down, turning new media on its head.”

"You Can't Get There From Here: the 2015 PMA Biennial" | Opening Oct. 8 | Curated by Alison Ferris | The exhibition will be on view through Jan. 3, 2016 | www.portlandmuseum.org

Images of the human face surround us everywhere for every sort of purpose from social networking to commercial advertising. Most interaction with the world happens through our faces which makes it a central point of contact. But it is also for good reason that the word self-effacement contains “face,” the part of our body we cannot see ourselves, because even in a mirror we only encounter an untruthful representation. The face is where we are at our most vulnerable, least controlled, most expressive.

The group exhibition “Ghosts 3” at Mayo Street Arts is based on Abby Shahn’s idea that every image of a person is actually a specter. A specter denotes a visible but incorporeal spirit usually of a terrifying nature and that latter part of the definition explains the haunting character of many images. In concept and execution the work ranges from slightly sophomoric to expressing deeply-felt truths. It embodies the show’s concept to varying degrees but even the more whimsical works exude a certain gravitas.

This third iteration of “Ghosts” contains painting, shaped fresco, collage, needlepoint, sculpture, and mixed media work by ten artists. While the works’ focus oscillates between face and figure, between the symbolic and the specific, the aim to reach beyond the surface is felt throughout.

Abbeth Russell’s drawings just play with ideas but her paintings impress with their sophisticated imagery and material realization. Working with iridescence and a lot of medium, a set of netherworldly characters emerge from the paint, tortured by Edvard Munch’s existential angst.

Martha Miller’s large drawings and collage are by far the most complex and accomplished works in the show. Drawn from her “Giant Journal” series, they refer to important points in the artist’s life and her various roles. With the scale and palette of the Mexican muralists, Miller embraces connections between cosmic and private, mixing myth and personal story by using her own iconography and symbolism to captivate us with mystery.

Michael Jackson, spectral in his elusiveness, may be the perfect subject for this show and for Susan Bickford’s collaborative approach. Assembled of squares created by several artists and abstract artworks in themselves, the work ingeniously acknowledges how we each contribute to the kaleidoscope that makes up celebrity, identity, and reality.

Alan Crichton’s charcoal grid of trees and male faces looks like an enlarged page from a sketchbook. One suspects that it comments on an evolutionary connection between sylvan ancients and modern man, especially since the drawing style is extremely dense at one end of the spectrum making one man look suspiciously hirsute.

Women are the subject of Barbara Sullivan’s shaped frescoes. Like attributes of saints, the forehead of one contains an actual nest, another head precariously balances an overflowing coffee cup. Suggesting the busyness of constant creation, these heads also address what sustains us, occupies us, and where we can find rest — in our minds alone.

Wally Warren’s witty assemblage sculptures explore what elements constitute a face, what animation. Like masks of a post-apocalyptic civilization that is rebuilding meaning from detritus, his sculptures embody the human impulse to create totems, effigies, and icons of worship.

James Fangbone’s contributions are disconcerting reorganizations of the human face drawn from ads and magazines. Extremely unsettling in their convincingness, they do not just disrupt the integrity of humanity but suggest a new species occupying familiar ground.

Inasmuch as any representation is always an afterimage it is ghostly in character. “Ghosts 3” points out that this quality becomes more pronounced when the subject is a living being. When do we read a shape as a figure, a face? When does portrait become memorial? What deep-seated responses are triggered by faces looking back at us, even those hardly recognizable as our cousins? The artists’ answers are more or less profound, but these questions always remain worth asking.

Britta Konau can be reached at bkonau@gmail.com.

“Ghosts 3” | Runs through Oct. 31 | At Mayo Street Arts, 10 Mayo St., Portland | 207.879.4629 | mayostreetarts.org

Putting aside the controversy over whether a curated Portland Museum of Art Biennial honors the intentions of the Thon Endowment Fund, exhibition curator Alison Ferris was faced with a task that would inevitably upset many Maine artists who did not get the chance to submit artwork for consideration. Ferris, previous curator at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and now at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, decided on a non-thematic tack guided by strength of work and inclusivity as far as geography, media, gender, race, and age are concerned. While this has resulted in a collection of impressive artworks it unfortunately lacks the thrill of many new discoveries.

There are only a few works that don’t really seem to belong in an exhibition meant to highlight The Best the state has to offer. The vast majority fits comfortably and convincingly within the Biennial’s qualitative standard. Outstanding among those is Warren Seelig’s “Shadowfield,” which employs schist scattered like an exploded landscape; Michael Kolster’s superb ambrotypes, which are lit to dramatic effect; and Caroline Lathan-Stiefel’s installation of pipe cleaners and plastic detritus, which is built up like a multi-layered painting.

Concepts of original and copy are smartly and skillfully explored through Jeffrey Clancy’s pewter recreations, and John Walker’s only but magnificent contribution, a wide-open abstraction with hints of landscape, displays a new and exciting tendency toward structure, calm and openness. Miles Spadone’s imaginative and slightly lubricious forms are surprisingly made of ceramic and urethane, and Randy Regier impresses, as always, with phenomenal imagination and craftsmanship. His retro-futuristic machine to dispel sadness is a product of complete integrity of concept and creation.

Anybody halfway familiar with the better half of Maine’s artists will encounter many familiars. The inclusion of Wabanaki basketmakers is therefore welcome, but why stop there, why treat them differently didactically, and why cram their work into an already too crowded gallery?

Among the many well-established participants, two artists whose work delights no matter how much you’ve seen of it are Lois Dodd and Dennis Pinette, curiously, two painters — Dodd for her cool eye, compositional strength and sense of color and Pinette for his romantic dystopian vision and handling of paint. The work of both seems fresher and more individualistic than much other art in the show. The big and exciting exceptions to that are Stacy Howe and Bradley Borthwick. Inspired by surrealist automatism, Howe creates tour de force drawings that combine images of seemingly randomly selected objects. These coalesce into mysterious emanations within tightly controlled compositions. Borthwick, a recent addition to the state, uses traditional working methods and materials: slate, leather, beeswax, and hardwood. Combining the same complex, undulating forms and materials in three different configurations, his sculptures evoke a sense of precarious stability grounded in weight, warmth, and support. They are earthy yet utterly sophisticated.

Although non-thematic, the Biennial’s title, “You Can’t Get There From Here,” is explained to address a common thread running through the show — basically that of the mystery and inexplicability of the artistic process. That does not do much to explain the selection of artists nor is it in any way specific to Maine. The show could equally well have been centered around the theme of tradition with solidly traditional techniques and obvious references to older art movements and subjects abounding. And tradition is at least something Maine is known for.

While the PMA continues to explore other options for its Biennial beyond the juried format, the past two iterations seem to be going in the right direction. However, more risks could be taken, a targeted call to artists could enhance a thematic show, and blatantly personal selections could inspire lively discussions about taste and subjectivity. In essence, inspiration for a more critical dialogue is needed.

Britta Konau can be reached at bkonau@gmail.com.

“You Can’t Get There From Here: The 2015 Portland Museum of Art Biennial” | Through Jan. 3, 2016 | At the Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland | 207.775.6148 | portlandmuseum.org

It is “difficult” to say, no doubt. But at the same time, Tolstoy’s proclamation makes a certain presupposition with its very underlying question. To ask “what is art?” suggests art has a categorical definition. It suggests, in other words, that art is something.

Lately I’ve been preoccupied with this question, in part because one of Portland’s primary identifications as a city is that it is “artistic.” But also because art, and the function of art in the 21st century, seem to be increasingly hard to identify. Really, what do we mean by art? Can we even say? As pressing as these questions are, I’m starting to wonder if framing it this way — as if art has a categorical definition or a precise function — isn’t in itself misleading. Not that I’m trying to pick a fight with Tolstoy. But, well, maybe I am.

For the last two years, Kelly Hrenko, assistant professor of art education at the University of Southern Maine, has partnered with Side X Side — a Portland educational nonprofit — in a K-5 arts integration project called “Project Imagine.” Project Imagine, now in its second year, was awarded the “Arts in Education Model Development and Dissemination Grant,” a prestigious $1.9 million four-year federal grant. It has expanded from last year’s pilot program at Portland’s Howard C. Reiche Elementary School, where it reached roughly 400 students and 16 teachers, to Ocean Avenue Elementary School, East End Community School, and Riverton Elementary School, reaching, in total, about 1,600 students and 75 classroom teachers.

According to the nonprofit’s website (http://sidexsideme.com/programs/project-imagine), the program’s aim, in short, is to “integrate standards-based arts education into core elementary and middle school curricula; strengthen standards-based arts instruction in these grades; improve student’s academic performance, including their skills in creating, performing and responding to the arts.” And one of the core tenets behind these goals is tying “arts-based instruction to Common Core learning standards.” Or, in Hrenko’s words, part of what the project imagines is “thinking through art in all content areas and through all disciplines, and what it looks like when you don’t isolate art as one class and one subject, but art as the facilitation of content.” The idea is that art as a creative process can help us learn about other things besides art.

Here’s an example: The third graders in each school do a unit on the ocean. “Most recently,” Hrenko said, “that unit has allowed a variety of teaching artists and experts to come in and work with the classes on thinking through the ocean in various process and lenses.”

First an oceanographer came to talk about the science of the sea, then a creative writer worked with descriptive language based on oceanography, and then the students sculpted papier-mache sea-life with a teaching artist. The final project, an installation art piece, allowed the students to position the sea-life “where they would be in the ocean.”

Of course, for Project Imagine, the primary implications are pedagogical. But at the same time, there is an important philosophical idea behind this way of teaching that extends back to Tolstoy and reaches into the roots of that perennial question: What is art? The pedagogical conceit behind Project Imagine suggests, in a way, that art is less about art as a subject, and more about a process through which we understand varying subjects. Art, in other words, isn’t any particular thing but rather a way of thinking about particular things. The difference here is between what and how, and this distinction is important. Tolstoy’s assertion that it is difficult to say what is meant by “good” art suggests that art is guided by an underlying what, that art is some thing and that when we are thinking about art we are engaging what that thing is. But Project Imagine suggests, at least from a theoretical perspective, that art is the process of thinking itself and how we engage with what something is, and not the other way around.

If I may, allow me to backtrack. Before talking with Hrenko, I had been interviewing artists throughout Portland. My question was difficult, and it is akin to Tolstoy’s mode of thinking. I asked: “What is the function of art?”

For Adhem Ibrahim, an international BFA student at Maine College of Art, “Art is a contradiction that forces itself into existence. It’s power. It plays many roles in American culture, but the most important one, in my opinion, is spiritual. Art has become more and more the sole source of spiritual energy.”

Dylan Richards, an artist who works in mixed media drawing with acrylic paints and colored pencils, said, “Art makes the soul perceptible … it allows you to see the essence of a person. A person’s total understanding of life itself can be expressed in drawing.”

For Liam Singh, a sculptor who recently moved here from Massachusetts, “Art is a visual poetry. A catalyst for thought. Obviously everyone’s interpretation of a piece is going to be different. But just to get people to think. To get them to form their own interpretations of an idea. Art is omnipresent. It’s everywhere you look. Everything has an artistic quality if you view it with that lens.”

Hannah Boone, a painter and sculptor, said, “Art is like culture. It defines things. It defines cultural trends.”

And Avery Birmingham, a woodworker who makes furniture, said: “Art is sharing. Sharing thoughts, feedback, experiences that people may relate to or may not have associated with so it’s something new. I personally would like to see art and craft seen just for the beauty that they are.”

I like the way these answers sound — the idea of creative energy emerging from opposites, the notion of a soul represented through art, or art itself as omnipresent and poetic, as the arbiter of culture and beautiful simply because it is beautiful — but I confess that these answers seem to point toward bigger questions that are, in a way, even harder to answer than defining art. What is meant by spiritual? What is meant by the soul? What is meant by beautiful or culture or in what context are we talking about opposites? My point isn’t an exercise in equivocation, but rather that these unanswerable questions are, perhaps, built into the very framework of thinking about art in terms of function.

Consider this difficulty by way of analogy: In New American Stories, a recent anthology of contemporary American short fiction, Ben Marcus, a fiction writer and essayist, writes: “Imagine trying to assert the importance of water. Food. Love. The company of others. Shelter. There are some things that we need so innately that it feels awkward and difficult to explain why.” Marcus is talking about literature, but his point could be just as easily made about art in general. Yet, where Marcus's analogy might resonate, it is more telling for its dissonance, oversimplification, and the subsequent questions it raises.

For starters, the comparison itself is problematic: We know why we need food, water and shelter. The function is obvious. Physiologically, these things sustain us. This is a biological fact. It's hard to say something so straightforward about art. And where one might be inclined to say that art psychologically sustains us, we are still left with the why element. We know why food sustains us. The psychological why behind art is far harder to identify.

In a way, our need for love and the company of others gets us closer to some of the ambiguities of art. As we locate the function of love and our need for others in the pulse of our own loneliness, some of the same questions we might ask about art arise, and yet, even here, comparing the two poses a categorical problem. We tend to know what love and the company of others looks like. And yes, while the idea of love may differ for some people, most of us can say, with some certainty, what love is not. This is harder to do with art. To say something is definitively not art often conflicts radically with what someone else believes is definitively art. Thus, in comparing art with concrete needs, as Marcus does, we miss the very thing that makes art what it is, that which is so difficult to name but at the same time so constitutive of art.

Julie Poitras-Santos, an adjunct assistant professor at Maine College of Art, put it this way: “I think what’s provocative or interesting about art and art practices is its ability to slip the noose, to slip categories. Perhaps that’s one of the qualities that makes art hard to defend but also provides a lot of its strength.”

For Poitras-Santos, thinking of art in terms of its function sets up a problematic binary between having a function and not having a function. “I feel like there’s a spectrum that we can engage with in a more productive manner,” she said. And not unlike Hrenko, she believes that spectrum has more to do with a process rather than some particular, concrete purpose.

“I am pro slowing down the arrival at concretizing meaning,” Poitras-Santos said. “I think that’s where productivity happens, that’s where creativity happens. … That’s an arena of process. An arena of engagement and development.” This, again, suggests a revision to Tolstoy’s underlying question. Asking what art is and where we locate its underlying function inevitably brings us to some concrete content, and by way of this categorical definition we tend to miss the ambiguities and fluidity that art has the potential to embody. Alternatively, and what thinking through art as a process suggests, is that art is more about how we arrive at some particular content rather than either the arrival or the content itself. This brings us back to the theoretical implications of Project Imagine. The point here isn’t to identify art as a subject, but to use it as a process to understand how we think about the subjects that we think about, and, better still, to allow for new ways of thinking about those subjects.

Then again, this is all starting to sound a little like a definition of art. But maybe that’s the point and part of the productive tension inherent to art and the way we consider it. To think about art is to inadvertently reach for a definition. This can’t be helped. The natural antecedent to thought is to presuppose some specific object. Yet, what if we shift that antecedent so that the object of thought is thinking itself? Perhaps here we can explore the balance between content and the varying forms and ways of thinking through which content is rendered. Maybe, as Hrenko put it, this is where art speaks to our need “to quantify but at the same time acknowledge that there are all these things that we can’t quantify and nor should we try. They’re just part of being human. Of navigating the world and being with each other.” And maybe it’s somewhere in this balance and tension that we arrive at the art of thinking about art.

Email Eric Severn at ericsevern@gmail.com.

When was the last time you’ve been to a ballet, theatre production or symphony orchestra performance?

Chances are, if you’re under the age of 35, you haven’t. Art organizations across the country are struggling to diversify their audiences and fill seats with a younger demographic. The National Endowment for the Arts, an independent federal agency that partners with state art agencies to stimulate the creative economy and exercise collective imaginations, conducted a study and found that audiences that attend performing or visual art shows are aging and declining.

Earlier this year, the NEA published their extensive report: A Decade of Arts Engagement, Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Spanning from 2002 to 2012, this survey is the largest and most comprehensive survey of U.S. arts participation, with a sample size exceeding 37,000 adults. According to the study, only 37 percent of U.S. adults have been to a live performing art event in the preceding 12 months. This includes outdoor performing art festivals, musicals, plays, ballets, classical music performances, dances and opera. Only 14 percent of respondents under the age of 35 said that they attended a classical music performance in the last year and 13.6 percent attended a musical theatre show. Musical play attendance overall dropped — 12 percent from 2008-2012, with the highest number of attendees over the age of 65.

Across the nation, the aging of lifelong patrons and decline in season ticket holders is a troubling trend that art organizations are trying to reverse in creative ways; and it’s not different here in Portland, in a city that labels itself as a youthful, vibrant arts community.

During an informal questioning of people casually hanging out around the more popular entertainment venues in Portland like SPACE Gallery, the State Theatre and Nickelodeon Cinemas, I attempted to uncover some of the barriers preventing young people from attending more “traditional” shows like ballet and theatre, as opposed to a rock concert or a movie showing. Their answers were varied but lined up evenly with findings published in the NEA’s survey. Time, cost, access, a lack of compelling advertising and having nobody to go with were all cited as reasons why young people aren’t going out to traditional art shows like they used to.

“It's a pain to park in downtown Portland just to see an exhibit of chairs nailed to the wall or paint splatters on a canvas,” said one anonymous respondent from Machias. “I'd be interested in the ballet, but I just never hear about what they're doing.”

“Once you've seen the Nutcracker a few times, you remember it,” said another respondent. “The same goes for yet another rendition of Hamlet; or a cheesy musical, or overacted Broadway play. Unfortunately the quality of the entertainment I can access at home outweighs the authenticity of the live performance. Netflix always has something new.”

According to the NEA survey, 71 percent of U.S. adults (about 167 million) consume arts through electronic media like the internet, radio or television.

When asked about the lack of interest with the traditional arts, some responded with “ain’t nobody got time for that,” and “Art shows? Not my cup of tea.” For many young Portlanders, the slight annoyance of driving into town, finding parking and paying for a $20 ticket are enough of a deterrent to ignore traditional art shows as a valuable form of entertainment. For others, classical music is boring, ballet is hard to understand and the sheer amount of images on the Internet make viewing paintings in a gallery seem like an obsolete activity.

“Art shows like that are just for a very particular crowd,” said Eliza Maxfield, a 28-year-old from Portland. “If I’m going to spend the money, I’d prefer to just go to a concert.”

For Chris Burns, a 37-year-old Portland native, musician and audio production major, a lack of traditional arts appreciation can be attributed to these factors: lack of education, and a cultural shift that values “pop media.”

“Pop culture is visceral, immediate and disposable,” said Burns. “It speaks to how the kids today are feeling, and in very simple, bite sized chunks that don't really need to be analyzed or listened to repeatedly to get the full meaning.”

Burns said that while Frederic Chopin’s classical music, for example, might conjure up the same emotions young people seek and with more nuance, subtlety and virtuosity, our collective culture doesn’t value those qualities. Instead younger people tend to value the videos, memes, images and GIFS they see on their social media pages, or shared from their favorite celebrity.

“The paltry arts education we're giving our kids makes them favor that kind of art because of its cultural dominance,” said Burns. “Unless there is a large cultural change, classical traditions will fall into obscurity.”

But curators, organizers, marketing directors, creators and appreciators of traditional arts across Portland are determined to reverse this national trend of disinterest within the youthful demographic by focusing their strategy on the motivations behind attending art shows.

“Everyone is trying to scramble to remove those barriers and increase the motivation to attend our shows,” said Eileen Phelan, the marketing director for Portland Stage, Maine’s largest, fully professional nonprofit theatre and learning space. “People crave communal experiences, and theatre provides just that.”

Phelan said that the audiences that usually come to Portland Stage shows are upper middle class, older, white people and it doesn’t help the actors on stage.

“Looking out at the audience and seeing a diverse crowd cultivates a relationship and a special energy for the actors,” said Phelan. “It’s tough to attract a younger crowd.”

According to the NEA survey, non-musical play attendance has dropped at a 33 percent rate over the past decade, with 8.3 percent (19.5 million adults) attending at least one event in 2012.

Part of the Portland Stage’s strategy to get young people in the door is creating a communal space where people don’t just view performance art, but socialize, learn and interact around it. Before and after each play, the Portland Stage opens its lobby so people can “hang out,” have a drink and talk about the experience with one another. And with the themes and topics that the Portland Stage actors will be experimenting with this season, attendees will have plenty to talk about.

“People in the young generations aren’t interested in just being entertained,” said Phelan. “They want an experience that’s more psychologically interactive, or socially minded. It doesn’t have to be super political, it just has to be a bit edgy.”

With activist and social justice themes in mind, the Portland Stage has crafted a new season of shows. There’s The Mountaintop, a re-imagining of the night before the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods, which tells the story of a young African immigrant working in the produce section and recounting the trauma of the Sudanese civil war. Later in the season, debuting in March, is My Name is Asher Lev, which tells the powerful story of a boy prodigy born into a Hasidic Jewish family in post-World War II Brooklyn.

“Theatre is one of the best ways to talk about social issues,” said Phelan. “You go with others. Everyone is going to have a different perspective. It’s an experience.”

At the Portland of Museum of Art, arguably our town’s center of visual arts with greats such as Winslow Homer, Rose Marasco’s thought-provoking photography, and royal British portraits from the Renaissance (just to name a fraction of their large, ever changing exhibitions), staff are crafting installations with the intention of encouraging younger audiences to think critically about visual culture today.

“There is something to the idea that young adults connect more with contemporary art that addresses issues of our time, but I’m not sure it’s as easy as saying young people like contemporary art, and they don’t like historic art,” said Jennifer DePrizio, the PMA’s Director of Learning and Interpretation. “I find that the key to attracting younger people to the museum is about making art relevant to them today, whether it was made last year or 100 years ago.”

Portland Stage and the Museum of Art are certainly not alone in their efforts toward creating an inviting, youthful atmosphere, around art with modern, more popular themes.

Norman Huynh, the assistant conductor at the Portland Symphony Orchestra, helped start the “Symphony and Spirits” initiative, in response to the continuous cycle of people over the age of 50 filling their seats. The event creates a hangout space in a Portland bar or Alpine Club, where people can spend $20 for a drink and a ticket.

“Typically people who come to the symphony are about 50 years and older,” said Huynh, who gets a sense of the demographic from survey research. “Pairing the shows with alcohol makes it easier to sell tickets to young people.”

Established in 1923, the Portland Symphony Orchestra is made up 82 professional musicians, who play classical music primarily at the Merrill Auditorium, but also take their skills on the road to the places like the Rines Theatre at the Portland Public Library and the Crooker Theatre in Brunswick. Their mission is to enrich the arts community by providing accessible and engaging programs that have been described as “a phenomenal experience.”

Huynh said that because people usually listen to music through their laptop or headphones, they're missing out on the live experience and the excitement and energy it exudes.

“I just want everybody to hear it,” said Huynh. “I know it can have a positive impact on anybody.”

Despite his personal love for live classical music, and extensive background in conducting workshops and symphonies, Huynh understands that the genre isn’t for everyone and that going to a first show can be intimidating.

“When you’re unfamiliar with something, you’re a bit more timid,” said Huynh. “But 100 percent of people who have taken our survey, said that they’d come to another show.”

Others like Phelan at Portland Stage and Nell Shipman, the artistic director at the Portland Ballet, share the same sentiment. Their advice? Go to more than one show a year, develop a taste for the art form by noticing the actors, dancers, themes and ideas presented on stage.

“If you go to one theatre show a year there’s going to be a lot of pressure on that show to be amazing,” said Phelan, who tries to instil an appreciation for theatre in people early on, through her educational outreach programs that serve 14,000 high school students.

“I think it’s really cool, for people who haven't seen ballet, to see their first show,” said Shipman, who just concluded her choreographed show, Three Tales By Poe, a dance performance based off of the dark short stories of Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe. “What they always say is, I had no idea that i would connect to that so much. Ballet is really not as stuffy as people think. It’s powerful and moving.”

Shipman is hard at work now choreographing the Portland Ballet’s next show, the Victorian Nutcracker, a timeless classic. However she noted that her previous works that had darker themes, like Three Tales By Poe and Jack the Ripper appealed more to a younger audience.

“Ballet is not just for 60-year-olds to get dressed up and go see something fancy,” said Michael Greer, the executive director of Portland Ballet and professional dancer himself. “It can be enjoyed by a younger demographic, especially contemporary works, they just have to know it’s happening.”

Greer cited tough competition from live music venues and a lack of exposure as reasons why the Portland Ballet doesn’t attract the most youthful audience. However, Greer and his team are trying to engage people through social media, a strategy shared by the Portland Museum of Art, another traditional arts organization attempting to put fresh pairs of eyes on their varied exhibitions.

According to Jennifer Cook, the director of civic relations at the Portland Museum of Art, the Internet is one of the biggest tools used to gauge their attendees’ demographic, connect with people and showcase the museum's 18,000-piece collection. Apart from featuring a digital version of every sculpture and painting in the museum, the PMA website (which just got relaunched with a new look) publishes its own original content like videos, informational podcasts and interviews with artists and curators.

“For the last two years reaching out to a younger demographic has become a top priority for the museum,” said Cook. “But people don’t want to just be engaged, they want to be part of the experience.”

On top of the digital efforts, Cook said that their current project Your Museum, Reimagined, will fundamentally change the way the public interacts with the museum. After opening new meeting rooms and participatory spaces, PMA aims to be more relevant to younger crowds in 2017 and will exhibit new collections across the museum, like one called “Modern Menagerie.”

Cook believes that because we’re bombarded by images everyday on the Internet, it’s important to see art face to face and with other people. So unconsciously echoing the strategies of the people at Portland Stage and the Portland Symphony, the museum is trying to transform its space into an artistic hub and cultivate its atmosphere around viewing art, discussing its function and implications with like minded, potentially buzzed people.

“We’re more in touch with a copy of a copy of a copy of art,” said Cook. “We want to create a more authentic experience. Young adults are looking for ways to connect with others socially.”

The Portland Museum does this by offering events with food, live music, artist talks and one-on-one workshops with creators and curators. The discussions have informative and interactive qualities and give attendees a more contextual understanding of the art they just viewed, one that couldn’t be conveyed through a screen. For art appreciators across Portland, forming a physical connection with art and its creators is the first step to developing a personal love for it.

With 71 percent of people in the U.S. viewing art through electronic media, it’s clear that we have to abandon that notion of “instant gratification,” when it comes to experiencing art of any medium. Maybe after disconnecting, unplugging, grabbing a friend, and leaving behind preconceived notions and stereotypes, some of Portland’s youth will start to appreciate the city’s numerous and robust traditional arts offerings.

PhoPa Gallery in Portland is showing the exhibition “In America,” featuring photographs by Ni Rong, who was born in Beijing, China, and now lives in Rockport.

“The invitation from PhoPa Gallery for a solo show was truly an honor and highlight,” she said, having first met Bruce Brown (co-curator with Jon Edwards) about two years ago at the Photo A Go-Go. Connie Hayes, her friend and a well-respected contemporary Maine painter, suggested she make a donation to the annual auction by the Bakery Photo Collective in Westbrook. At the auction, right in front of her donated image, a photo from the “In America” series, she met Brown, also the Center for Maine Contemporary Art curator emeritus.

“Bruce’s understanding of the image and later on, the series, left me with a deep memory,” Rong said. “Not only does he have a keen eye photographically, he truly understands the ideas and emotions behind the series.”

Brown made a poignant observation when commenting on two images, Winter #11, walking in snow toward birch trees, taken in Rong’s front yard in Rockport, and Winter #10, standing in a snow-covered corn field, taken in Jefferson, Maine.

“For Winter #11, you were here in the States; for Winter #10, you were in China,” he told her.

“That was so true. It was exactly what was in my mind while making those images. It was remarkable, especially for someone who did not know much about the turmoil of my upbringing in China during the Cultural Revolution. There’s a generation of people like me, who lost their education and chance to learn their own culture heritage”.

Brown’s observations sent her reeling back in time, and helped connect her present with her past.

“The corn field took me back. For three years after high school, I worked hard-labor work” – character building, she said. Life started in a remote village north of Beijing. “I didn’t know anything about the real world. I worked there until the Cultural Revolution ended and we had the chance to take college exams, along with 10 years of accumulated students. I felt very fortunate to pass the exam and go back to college. The three-year period had a big impact on my life.”

Rong feels like she is speaking for a lot of students from her generation who came from China and had a similar experience.

PhoPa Gallery decided to use three photographs taken in Beijing to introduce the show. The photos are of Rong on a three-wheel bicycle delivery cart, taken on instinct when she was traveling back in her homeland.

There were no cars; everything was rickshaw, those three-wheeled vehicles reminded her of the old rickshaw. So there was the first shot.

When she got a chance to upload the images to her computer, she noticed something very authentic about the shots, and then spent a few days in Beijing looking for more three-wheeled vehicles.

“It was really insightful of Bruce to use these images to introduce the show,” she said.

Rong was first introduced to photography by her father, when she was 13 and he worked in the Chinese Embassy in Moscow. She was in high school in Beijing, all by herself.

“It was not a serious camera, but it was serious enough for a 13-year-old. He was self-taught, and takes beautiful photographs, but never went to school for it,” she said. “The first really good photos I saw were taken by him.”

A series of displacements, including coming to America in 1985 for graduate school and awakening to the importance of roots, were all built on top of the first displacement: being sent away from home after high school to work in the remote countryside.

“Coming to a strange country, leaving family behind — it was a very challenging experience,” she said. “Life needs challenge. When you have challenge, it brings out the best you have. But that feeling of displacement is still familiar.”

Rong moved to Rockport in 2005, and finally found the home she’s been searching for since leaving China 30 years ago.

“I became more aware of my identity after I came to the U.S. There was this identity that came with me,” she said. “Once I picked up a camera, it was obviously the project I wanted to explore. I didn’t do it because I didn’t have a model. And I never thought of using myself as the model.”

An epiphany of sorts came when working with Cig Harvey, the noted photographer who lives in Midcoast Maine. Rong attended one of Harvey’s workshops when she realized the project couldn’t be done with anybody else.

“It’s amazing when putting yourself in front of the camera what you have to face. You go deep. Inward. I felt I made a lot of connections,” she said. “It made me be aware of who I am, where I came from, what really makes us so unique. It made me think everyone should have a project.”

Rong hopes that visitors to the exhibit will be able to connect with her theme, no matter their own personal journeys, and reactions to her work at smaller exhibits so far have borne out her expectations.

“Whether they are men or women, Asian or American, a lot of people have an emotional response. They feel like this person is going through a transformation. Make them reflect on their own life, whether they have physically been displaced or not, we all change and grow. I hope people continue to feel that,” she said. “I didn’t do this project for anyone else. I didn’t do this to make art, to sell or have a gallery show. It was a project I really wanted to do. Once I started, I could not stop. The journey continues.”

“In America” | Photography by Ni Rong | Through Dec. 19 | PhoPa Gallery, 132 Washington Ave., Portland | Opening Reception: Friday, Nov. 13, 5:00pm to 7:00pm |

Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, noon-5:00pm, and by appointment | FREE

Gallery Details: PhoPa Gallery is a collaboration among photographer Jon Edwards, independent curator Bruce Brown, and Maine Media Workshops + College. PhoPa features (pho)tography and works on (pa)per by emerging to established Maine artists, not often shown in Portland. The gallery divides its schedule between showcasing MMW+C students, alumni, and faculty and exhibitions organized by Brown and Edwards. A percentage of all sales at PhoPa Gallery are donated to MMW+C, a 501c3 nonprofit educational organization.

The N.C. Wyeth Caper, widely regarded as Maine’s most significant fine art theft, is one step closer to reaching its conclusion, after an 18-month, nationwide investigation.

A pair of historically significant Wyeth paintings, speculated to be worth about $500,000 each, were recovered thanks to the combined efforts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Portland Police Department, the U.S. Attorney’s offices and the Beverly Hill Police Department.

The paintings, titled, “The Encounter on Freshwater Cliff,” and “Go Dutton and That Right Speedily,” were recovered in the Greater Boston area, after a third-party, anonymous tipper surrendered them to retired FBI agent Jim Siracusa. This tip led to the light at the end of the tunnel for an investigation that originally started in June 2013, when the Portland Police asked for FBI assistance in solving a theft of six Wyeth works from the home of landlord Joseph Soley.

“The owner is incredibly relieved to have these irreplaceable works returned to his family. Now that the ordeal is nearly over, he’s entrusted the museum to share them with the public,” announced Portland Museum of Art Director Mark Bessire. “Art heists hold a certain romantic allure, yet the reality is that many pieces of art are extremely fragile, and in the wrong hands, they could be lost forever.”

Thankfully, all six of the works didn’t sustain any damage and were found in good condition, in their original frames and cardboard boxes. The Portland Museum of Art is temporarily hosting the paintings, in an exhibition titled The Great N.C. Wyeth Caper: Paintings by America’s Storyteller, so the public can enjoy them until Jan. 3.

"The owner is incredibly relieved to have these irreplaceable works returned to his family," said Bessire. "Now that the ordeal is nearly over, he's entrusted the museum to share them with the public."

During a press conference at the Portland Museum of Art last Thursday, FBI officials said that although all six of the paintings are now safe and three people have been arrested for their involvement in the theft, the investigation is not over. No reward money has been issued (the FBI offered a $20,000 reward for information back in August) and no more arrests have been made, and because of the ongoing nature of the case, FBI officials declined to comment on several questions.

So far these unanswered questions remain: How much were the paintings selling for in the pawn shop? Why can’t museum directors comment on how much valuable paintings are worth? Is the gentlemen that came forward, and tipped the FBI in Boston, involved in the ongoing investigation? What exactly was the route the paintings took to California? Did the paintings change hands other times along the way? What are the FBI investigators looking for in the ongoing investigation? How exactly did the burglar break into Soley’s home if there were no signs of forced entry found?

For now this information is unavailable to the public but here’s what we do know about the investigation and its history. Joseph Soley, a prominent landlord in Portland (he owns the People’s United Bank building downtown), got to know Andrew Wyeth, one of the best known American artists of the 20th century, while he lived nearby in Camden. Over the decades of their friendship, Soley collected six works of N.C. Wyeth (Andrew’s father) and stored them in an unoccupied apartment at 18 Monument Square. Then on May 7, 2013, a Soley family member discovered the works were missing and called the Portland Police to respond to what they thought was an average burglary. Except it wasn’t an average burglary; there were no signs of forced entry and what vanished were six incredibly important pieces to America’s artistic past.

According to the Portland Press Herald, the collection was worth “tens of millions of dollars.” The case required FBI assistance after the local police speculated that these valuable works had probably crossed state lines in attempts to be sold. The trail of evidence led to a pawnshop in Beverly Hills, Calif. , where the aspiring Los Angeles rapper Oscar Roberts took four of the paintings to secure a $100,000 loan. The owner of the “Dina Collection” pawn shop, Yossi Dina, said that she was suspicious of the art’s legality and contacted the FBI’s special art crime team, who came and recovered the four works.

Roberts is now sentenced to 20 months in federal prison for pledging stolen property.

Other people were implicated in the criminal case, too, such as Dean Coroniti of North Hollywood and Lawrence Estrella of New Hampshire, both of whom are being prosecuted for possessing and transporting stolen property, authorities said.

The two paintings that were most recently recovered, “The Encounter on Freshwater Cliff,” and “Go Dutton and That Right Speedily,” are striking paintings. The first one features a dapper warrior performing a merciless execution on a slain foe. The second one depicts, with vivid reds and soft brown tones, several smug-looking men in medieval attire peering out of a doorway. Soley, the Portland police and the art community are extremely grateful that these works have made it back to their home state.

“It’s a big deal to recover six pieces like this,” said Portland Police Chief Michael Sauschuck. “It’s a big deal for the art community and the attorney’s officers and the investigators involved.”

“We’re so fortunate to have law enforcement with us today,” said PMA’s Bessire. “These paintings are extremely valuable treasures and works of culture. Some of our favorite paintings are by N.C. Wyeth. His tradition in Maine really tells the great story our state has played in American art history.”

N.C. Wyeth, born in Needham in 1882, illustrated over 112 books (Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, among others) in his lifetime. He prided himself on his realism, in a time where the exciting emergent technology of photography was competing with his craft. Wyeth also painted historical scenes, landscapes and portraits, but understood the difference in illustrated drawings and vibrant oil paintings.

"Painting and illustration cannot be mixed,” said Wyeth in 1908. “One cannot merge from one into the other."

Both N.C. Wyeth and his son Andrew Wyeth had strong ties to Maine. They both split their time between Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania and Maine, where they each painted aspects of their life around them. N.C. Wyeth spent his summers in an old captain’s house he restored in Port Clyde Maine, while Andrew spent his in Cushing, Maine. In 1945, N.C. Wyeth received the honorary degree of master of arts from Bowdoin College.

To recover stolen items and prosecute art and cultural property crime, the FBI has a specialized Art Crime Team, of 16 special agents supported by special trial attorneys. The team investigates theft, fraud, looting and trafficking across state and international lines, with estimated losses in the billions. The FBI also runs the National Stolen Art File, a computerized index of stolen art and cultural properties that is used as a reference by law enforcement agencies worldwide.