If we can’t count on art students to draw us plebes away from mass political confusion and inane HuffPo headlines and toward thrilling, liberatory ideas, then we’re in trouble.

Luckily, the Maine College of Art’s annual MFA Thesis Exhibition—first of the Trump era—finds our most supple art minds up to the task. With video, installation, performance and multimedia work, these nine MFA students not only confront the stultifying, oppressive, and boring-ass norms of American cultural life, they also embrace the avenues by which identity and physicality is developing political bite.

Queerer and more boldly physical than years past, the collection shows that for all the stupidity and nonsense in American political life, artists are making personal and discoveries from the repression and the haze, recognizing that body and identity can be powerful tools for political agency.

Exhibit A of this is Shelby Wynne Richardson’s Will You Pet My Pussy?, a handmade mixed-media artist book which fuses the visual vocabulary of illustrated pop-up stories with a queer feminist ethos and the language of consent-based sex education. Drawing, as she states, from the “Instagram-famous, those who wear their ‘plastic-ness’ on their sleeves,” each spread displays a hand-rendered vagina rendered in materially discrete forms. Some are kitschy, some cute; many are indeed fun to pet (which Richardson invites). Alongside each is a dictum of pussyplay the artist spells out in blocky nursery-rhyme verse (“First tickle on my inner thights / With foreplay please be slow not shy”). During my visit, a mid-fifties male security guard approached Will You Pet My Pussy? with what looked to be curiosity and bemusement, wearing a uniform and the thin armor of a smirk. It reminded me of the Instagram phenomenon of viewing a familiar feed (yours or another’s) imagined through the eyes of an interesting friend. What did that person think of that image?

It was Foucault who believed that society was a grid of ideological planes stacked incongruously atop one another, never fitting properly, and artist Dayna Riemlind makes no less vivid a statement. She stitches patterns and embroidered design onto dye-sublimated prints of photographs of distinct places, drawing out historical and personal meaning by contrasting spheres of time, geography, and memory. Her Watcher (2017, hand embroidery on cotton, 34” x 40”), arguably the show’s most vivid image, conjoins two hands in embroidered red fabric pocked with teary blue eyes, a sign that the artistic terrain Riemlind works in expands beyond the physical world and into dream.

A loud piece by Jose Rodriguez, Jr. builds on queer theorist Lee Edelman’s principle insight from the landmark 2004 book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Edelman’s theory of “reproductive futurism” identifies that the common American political platform of being “pro-children” and “pro-future,” which both party’s figures adopt as unassailable rhetoric during political campaigns, is intrinsically and problematically heteronormative and assumes the supremacy of procreative families above other citizens. (In the book, Edelman cites a GOP operative complaining in the New York Times about a 1997 Bill Clinton photo-op beside wife and daughter: “This is the father picture,” says the Republican media consultant. “This is the daddy bear, this is the head of the political household. Nothing helps him more.”)

Rodriguez wants to fuck with this. With campy humor and nods to Edelman, This Land Is My Land erects a mock political rally—complete with original political branding, a lot of bear imagery and cosplay, and one hypnotically repetitious speech, all of it a satire on the politics of family values and its latent homophobia. As the show’s only piece wiith sound, Rodriguez’s looping audio track (and its recurring fugue of “This Is Our Time”) can dominate the atmosphere. But in a world where prominent right-wing figures formed Gays For Trump coalitions and recast the real estate mogul as “Daddy,” there’s much to explore here beyond Edelman.

I can’t remember a gallery experience as visceral as I had viewing the work of Sarah Emch, an artist whose three video pieces attempt to reconcile past experiences of self-multilation and the methods of confronting personal trauma. In one, a five-minute video titled Recollection, we see the artist’s bared upper chest repeatedly sliced with a small blade (presumably by her own hand). Though the blade cuts at bare surface level, her skin’s response—the slowly forming scars and dotting pockets of blood—effectively conveys a rhythm of pain far deeper than skin. In the disquieting Involuntary, we witness the artist seeming to attempt (and fail) to condition herself to the reflexive physical response to a red-colored fluid periodically dripping onto her forehead. Viewed as she lays supine with eyes closed, it is an agonizing and intimate 17-minute ritual. As challenging as they are to watch, Emch’s artful, vulnerable explorations of the body’s relationship to trauma and abuse are tremendously affecting.

Other standouts include Seed, a stratified woman, in which Louise Coupar-Stamat evokes themes of birth and emergence through the material history of clay, a substance she entombs and cakes around several women over video. Three large material sculptures by Benjamin Spalding, collected here as Bacaloo, fuse discrete, transregional cultural signifiers (like Santeria altars, hockey gloves, and New England flannel) into ecstatic figural representations of the amalgamate identities of the artist’s cultural heritage. They’re kind of glorious. I missed the live performance by Crystal Gale Phelps, said to summon political agency through contemporary dance and circus arts (though viewers can catch her again on June 9 from 1 to 4 pm).

There may never have been a stupider, more cynical time to be alive. But look at these folks. They’ve found a few ideas worth holding on to.

MECA MFA Thesis Exhibition | Through June 9 | ICA at MECA, 522 Congress St., Portland | www.meca.edu

Nick Schroeder can be reached at nick@portlandphoenix.me

Ghost Fence, sculptural installation by John Sundling | Through June 30 | Franklin Arterial and Congress St, Portland | https://tempoartmaine.org

An earlier version of this story cited Scott Hanson's YouTube video as the "History of Lincoln Street." It is actually the "History of Franklin Street."

If your love of Maine art goes deeper than First Friday hangout sessions, check these compelling art shows on view while they're hot.

1. Selvedge at Able Baker Contemporary

Curated by muralist and painter Tessa Greene O'Brien, Selvedge is a dynamic group exhibition of artists playing with the fundamental methods of making paintings, substituting new techniques and processes to the fundamental stapes of medium, support, and surface to create avenues that expand the history and tradition of the form. With works from Elizabeth Fram, Cassie Jones, Beth Kleene, Erica Licea-Kane, Susan Metrican, Maria Molteni, Tessa Greene O'Brien, Isabelle O'Donnell, and Martha Tuttle, this colorful and adventurous show at the fresh Able Baker looks like one of the most exciting contemporary art exhibits the city has seen in years. 

Through August 5 | Able Baker Contemporary | 29 Forest Ave., Portland | Thurs-Sat 1-5:30 pm | www.ablebakercontemporary.com

2. The Loved Ones, photography by Smith Galtney and Matthew Papa at SPEEDWELL Projects

At this new gallery on the edge of town, see a fine dual show between acclaimed Maine shooter Smith Galtney and New York's Matthew Papa, two gay, middle-aged, married men who met while studying at the International Center of Photography. With two distinct styles, The Loved Ones explores identity, family, desire and domesticity, as well as love and partnership during the time of AIDS. As you may recall, Galtney was commissioned by the Frannie Peabody Center in 2014 for a photo series called SeeingME: Profiles of Resilience, highlighting the diverse set of individuals representing the HIV/AIDS community in Maine.

July 1-Sep 1 | SPEEDWELL Projects | 630 Forest Ave., Porttland | Thurs-Sat 2-6 pm | https://www.speedwellprojects.com/ 

3. '+/-', multimedia installation by Alia Ali at SPACE Gallery

If you haven't already seen how Alia Ali transformed this dark showroom and venue, prepare to be wowed. The Yemeni-Bosnian-American multimedia artist speaks beautifully about the blur between cultural vocabulary in this dizzyingly interesting show. A child of linguists, Alia Ali's displayed works as well as the environmental detail she's rendered onto SPACE examines the in-between space between poetics and politics in ways deeper and richer than any modern cultural think piece. 

Through July 29 | SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St., Portland | Wed-Sat noon-6 pm | www.space538.org 

With long, bright summer days in full swing, most of us aren’t thinking about themes typically associated with autumn, like haunted houses and spirits. But as one local team of paranormal investigators recognize, ghosts don’t take vacations.

A team of young Mainers — Ash Brooks, Carol Cleveland, Tyler Gowen, and Katie Webb — recently launched Season Four of a YouTube series called Haunt ME, which has them exploring what they've identified as historically haunted sites around the state and documenting signs of alleged supernatural activity.

They all wholeheartedly believe in the existence of paranormal presences, claiming that they are organized under three categories: intelligent, residual, and other. Under this assumption, the team approaches each episode as seriously and methodically as possible.

After spending several years touring Maine’s spookiest spots, any doubts about the existence of these entities were completely exorcised from their minds.

“Any bit of skepticism has been eliminated,” said Gowen, an English degree holder from the University of New England who acts as the tech analyst on the show. “We definitely believe there’s something weird and supernatural out there. What that weirdness exactly is, however, is up for debate.”

This type of reality television is of course nothing new, with seminal shows like Ghost Hunters, Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files, and Unsolved Mysteries inspiring an entire genre of spectral docudrama-style reality shows since the late '90s.

But Haunt ME is unique in two ways. It’s fan-funded on YouTube and focuses solely on Maine, a state home to many legends and its own storied, mysterious history of reported haunts. 

“There are incredible stories to share in Maine,” said Gowen. “This state is steeped in lore. There’s so much here that’s undisturbed and has a level of magic to it that really makes this show work.”

The show has shot at creepy locations like the Parsonfield’s Seminary, Biddeford’s Old Mill Complex, Portland’s Masonic Temple, Fort Knox, the haunted lighthouse at Seguin Island, and Fryeburg’s Admiral Peary Inn, to name a few.

Apart from these locations, the rest of what the show features is pretty standard genre fare. The team members all have different roles — Gowen a tech analyst who searches for evidence of ghosts with a camera, audio recorder, and K2 meter; Brooks a folklorist who offers historical accounts; Cleveland the manesologist (something like a paranormal psychologist) who attempts to contact spirits; and Webb the oculist who provides “arcane knowledge.”

They research and scout each site, providing viewers with both historical and mythological context, while attempting to make contact with the other side using everything from tarot cards to electromagnetic scanners. The episodes, each about 20 minutes long, then offer a variety of creepy location shots, seemingly unexplainable sights, sounds, and objects, spooked reactions from the cast, and interviews with paranormal experts woven in between.

“Haunt ME isn’t sensationalized at all. Footage is simply captured and presented,” said Gowen. “And instead of just trying to log in evidence of ghosts, we actually try to help the people both alive and dead that are in these places that we visit.”

While many won’t likely be swayed to believing in otherworldly beings from this show, it does provide some thought-provoking entertainment, with an underlying theme of local Maine history that proves to be quite interesting. There are also meta-dramas that provide fairly exciting narratives. For example, you may not see scientifically conclusive evidence of a ghost on their Sanford Mill episode, but it’s engaging to see a group of young adults navigate completely blind in a huge abandoned industrial complex that they're definitely not allowed to be in.

“Let’s just say it was a really bad idea,” teased Gowen.

Haunt ME, and the perspectives of its cast, also invite viewers to ponder an interesting, if not unsettling thought experiment: assuming ghosts are real, what if they’re not malevolent, just highly misunderstood?

Gowen believes that there’s some form of existence after death, and souls can get caught wandering on Earth unable to communicate with the living without confusing, hurting, or terrifying them. Imagine you’ve been dead for 50 years, trapped in your old house, but you can only register your presence by flickering lights or scratching the skins of the new, living, occupants.

Wouldn't you be scratching them all the time attempting to make contact? 

“I can’t imagine how isolating and painful that must be for spirits,” said Gowen. “They look shadows to us and we look like shadows to them. We could just be haunting each other.

Need a road trip idea? Visit Haunt ME’s index of Maine’s haunted sites, and send in your idea for a Season 5 location here: http://haunt-me.com.

With Speedwell Projects’ current exhibition The Loved Ones, photographs by Smith Galtney of Maine and Matthew Papa of New York City, I wondered whether I could write an objective review.

Smith is a friend and I love his work. But not every relationship is perfect and some of the issues I have with ours offered perspective. For this review, I decided to let go of objectivity.

Speedwell Projects is a new gallery on outer Forest Avenue near Woodfords Corner opened by the nationally recognized photographer Jocelyn Lee. From what I’ve seen, hers is a measured and gracious force that I trust will ground this newly minted multi-use art and performance venue. Her eye is honed and has a story of its own.

The legacy represented and propelling the work shown in The Loved Ones, in both culture and production, is fully intertwined with my own. Look no further than the book of Alvin Baltrop photography on the coffee table that greets you in what is Smith’s attempt to lay a historical groundwork for the exhibition. Baltrop was under-recognized during his lifetime for his photographs from the ‘70s and ‘80s of gay black men cruising the West Side Highway piers, the center of New York City’s gay sex underground. While the visual language of this time is more evident in the subjects and poses in Matthew’s work, Smith pins it to a contemporary moment in the form of a slideshow video, schooling us on the art of deadpan photographic delivery, unadorned commitment to light and inside views of domesticity.

Photograph by Smith Galtney

Let’s rewind to right before I’m getting ready to see the exhibition. The routine is familiar: eat a balanced meal, pack an extra layer, park my bicycle at least a block away so that I have time to prepare myself to be surrounded by a room full of white dudes. Smith greeted me as soon as I entered.

Before even looking at the work I ask, “So what about race?” Of course, he fumbles nervously. Then he replies. “I love photography,” he says, and adds something about just trying to be a decent human being. Before even seeing the show, I went into this all hung up on the issue of naming in the context of identity politics. The press release introduces The Loved Ones as a show by two gay photographers. That’s it. Just two gay photographers. So. Like. What kind of gay? Would it be like black and brown fem bodies dancing to fierce house music and burning incense? No? Not that type of gay? Oh right, the middle-aged white dude type of gay. The default.

This is hard to explain. “Gay white male” is more specific than just gay. Just gay assumes whiteness (unless there are black artists present, then it would be othered and called a gay black show). But what’s more specific than gay white male — and this is the point I’m trying to make — are Smith and Matthew’s individual visions. So at first glance, the show looks very gay white male. I’m mostly talking about the audience — the people who came to the reception and the legacy the work is coming from. Looking again, there is some gender and ethnic diversity. The show doesn’t feel as white as the framing of it did in its press release and advertising. But that too is interesting — that presumption of whiteness.

I know Smith. I have collaborated with him, and while I may not look like the middle-aged gay white man represented in this exhibition, I know his ways and have been supported by his work. We have overlapping themes in our work as artists which reference the way gay men cruise for casual intimacy and negotiate acceptance. I see the Matthew Papa photographs and their daring nod to art created in a time when sex could first mean death. I know what it feels like to fight for something only to be told that it can now kill you.

What about you? Did you know about a sea of gay white dudes in the Castro, rising and falling in the alternating triumph of sexual liberation and the caustic ruin of AIDS? Did you also know about their dance parties and political tirades? The press release describes Smith and Matthew as two gay artists. Why is whiteness left out as an assumed default?

Keep it real and call it what it is — two middle-aged gay white dudes taking photos on fairly opposite ends of the respectability spectrum. One takes them as a way of documenting a settled and pedestrian middle-aged gay married life (Galtney) and the other makes images with nudes and ephemerality (Papa). If you’re gonna name something, don’t beat around the identity bush — name it! If this is “gay white male” culture, then it is one with a history that overlaps with my own (and many others’). Will these labels help us see in these photographs the heartbreaking beauty in what it means to forge ahead? To live? To die? To be seen? To celebrate and to hesitate? To be human and to be loved? This is the legacy I see living and breathing in this work. Whether or not it belongs to the identity and culture of gay white men is a question that will have to sit alongside the historical importance and quiet bravery on display.

The Loved Ones, photography by Smith Galtney & Matthew Papa | Through September 1 | SPEEDWELL Projects, 630 Forest Ave., Portland | Tues-Sat 2-6pm | Artist talk July 28 5:30pm

In a show that feels both formally radical and historically reverent, Selvedge — on view now at Able Baker Contemporary — grapples with the practice of painting through a new lens. The nine women’s works shown in this exhibition — including Portland painter and muralist Tessa Greene O’Brien, who began curating it last November — share in their effort to sublimate the process of painting through methods and practices associated with textile-making.

This allows an innovation into the form that these welltrained painters deploy affectingly, but the idea itself is hardly new. O’Brien makes studious mention of historical influences, most notably the Support/Surfaces art movement originating in the south of France in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Bound together by political disenfranchisement, Support/Surfaces artists sought to deconstruct the medium by isolating and modulating its core components of medium, support, and surface, sloughing off historical references, representation, or intentional expressions of sentiment.

Maria Molteni, Tennis Panties, 2016, sewn cotton, athletic mesh, fringe, tennis balls

Ranging in age from 21 to sixty something and each coming from a strong pedigree, it may nonetheless be a stretch to say this show’s artists share political sentiments as strong as their forebears. On the other hand, any consideration of textiles as a fine art form intersecting with the capital-e Establishment history of painting (clumped together as it is by innumerable male idols) is political in its own right. To employing the medium and process of textile- and fabric-making imbues the show with the historical weight of the labors of women the world over — from those working from factories in Iran during the Shah’s rule to the African-American slave women quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, to women working in textile mills in colonial New England.

Given that historical weight, viewing Selvedge is surprisingly an enjoyable, often playful affair. Maria Molteni’s Untitled (Painted Tennis Net), a 13-foot climbing rope with cargo/tennis knots and vibrantly neon-green acrylic paint, registers as a sort of aesthetic mashup of the works of Alex Da Corte and ‘70s French artist Daniel Dezeuze. Erica Licea-Kane’s series of acrylic pigment on acrylic fabric are busy and linear, their tight webbing striking a balance between earthy mosaics and De Stijl arithmetics. And the light, inventive works of Maine College of Art grad Isabelle O’Donnell nod toward, among others, Portland artist and educator Elizabeth Jabar’s work in this field.

Martha Tuttle, Weather (3), 2017, wool, silk, dye

The handwoven, tactile pieces of Martha Tuttle are some of the shows most inviting highlights. A series titled Like Water I Have No Skin merges wool, silk, and natural dyes in muted, serene color fields, as does the painterly and arrestingly calming Weather (3), a structure of light, free-hanging fabric bound together by weights and pins. Gauzy and ethereal, it’s one of the best representations of the show’s conceit, effortlessly conveying how simple layered textiles can change the way artists approach the medium of paint (and vice versa). Similarly, Beth Kleene’s 4 Eyes in the gallery window, a 50” x 44” tapestry of bright orange acrylic, ink, and hand-dyed cotton fabric, fuses the Portland artist’s typically splashy and jewel-like paintings with the quiet hypnotic finesse of 20th-century quilt work.

A collection of odder, smaller, and less serious-seeming works is peppered along a “salon wall” in the main floor, helping to further articulate the act of textile work through the lens of painting. Notable among them are Cassie Jones’s vibrantly distinct series of acrylic, felt, and staples on panel. To non-artists — and I mean this as a mark of distinction — Jones’s pieces might look as if they’re ripped right out of a Teletubbies episode, but that’s a testament to their playful execution, imaginative coloration, and brilliant deployment of shape and contour. I’m told Jones doesn’t make work like this anymore, but their inclusion here is another helpful illustration of the show’s ideas.

Susan Metrican, Worm Through Here, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 50” X 40”

O’Brien perhaps too modestly includes only two of her own pieces here. A gifted painter and muralist whose use of color typically dazzles, her stuff in Selvedge first seemed to me to be uncharacteristically dowdy and dark. But both pieces — the rugged coveralls-as-color field trick of Bonanza and the dyed canvas cushion flecked with different blots of paint she’s titled Painting for Bella — are impossible to assess without imagining the sweat put into them, and smartly add a bit of grit to the overall palette. After all, having produced a dazzling show that honors art traditions having as much to do with labor as invention, she’s definitely done the work.

Selvedge, mixed media group exhibition | Through August 5 | At Able Baker Contemporary, 29 Forest Ave., Portland | Thu-Sat 1-5:30pm |  www.ablebakercontemporary.com

Nick Schroeder can be reached at nick@portlandphoenix.me

Since she first appeared as a student in MECA’s Graduate Studies painting program, I’ve been a huge fan of Michel Droge’s work. Her thick, hazy, metallic-seeming paintings held both darkness and light as well as anyone in the state (not named Dozier Bell). But “Hiraeth,” her short-stay exhibition of cyanotypes and embossings, Droge takes a left turn into a different medium and intention.

In an artist statement, Droge defines “hiraeth,” a Welsh term, as “a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost pieces of your past.” A year prior to when she began the work that would end up in this exhibition, Droge’s brother died of an opiate overdose. “Everything familiar had come undone. I was navigated uncharted waters,” she writes. “I began a series of prints based on the idea of unraveling an Aran sweater.”

Those prints are included here, as well as numerous cyanotypes and several pieces that seem to serve as a stand-in for the sweater itself.

Haunting and apparitional, Droge’s work in Hiraeth is vibrantly nostalgic. With a primary color palette of white and aqua, the show conveys a nautical theme, the images vaguely recalling fisherman’s maps and navigational charts. Droge and her brother grew up sailing on the water. They’d spend summers on Block Island.

Droge came to study at MECA in 2009, and as she recalls it, kept to herself about the heavier themes of the past year that had been informing her work. She says that even as she was making the embossings and occasionally showing them in town, she’d never really talked about the work’s connection to her brother. “I would just talk really vaguely about the universal feeling of being lost at sea.”

Years later, Droge made cyanotypes working with the same themes and materials, a set of stick chart drawings she says “helped navigate emotional and unconscious waters.” A photographic printing process that ammonium iron citrate and potassium ferricyanide, cyanotype prints emerge a cyan-blue hue, squarely in the register of marine aesthetics. Relative to other methods of printing, the image tends to fade when exposed to the basic elements.

Printed, the crudely formed stick charts took on constellatory patterns, and she combined them with the sweaters and embossings for a three-pronged exploration of what the artist describes as the unconscious emotional realm she’s navigated since her brother’s passing.

Droge wonders if the story behind this work overshadows its universality, but her exhibition at the airy, well-lit Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick, is simple and inviting. Frayed ends of the cable-knit sweater appear in the cyanotype “Shoals” as the distant shores of land masses, with narrow isthmuses curling off the frame. In “Prophecy,” we see the white form and outline of the sweater as though its arms are raised up in surrender. In the cyanotype “Thief,” the sweater-sleeve imprint conjoins with a bed of stars imprinted from the stick charts.

As an educator who encourages young artists to engage with the coastline and its various storylines, from the effects of climate change on working life to the drug problem in coastal communities, Droge’s exhibit here is without question the most personal we’ve seen from her. It’s harrowing stuff, even with its macabre themes soundly sublimated into an art medium, the cyanotype, that could otherwise be described as angelic. Viewers would enjoy it even without knowing the whole story, its universality is indeed strong. But for those who might grapple with the work in particular terms, it’s as life-affirming as it gets.

Hiraeth, works on paper by Michel Droge | Through Aug 31 | At the Frank Brockman Gallery, 68 Maine St, Brunswick

You wanna know about Border Patrol? I'll tell you about Border Patrol. Elizabeth Spavento came here a year or two ago to head the visual art programming at SPACE Gallery. She and her partner, Border Patrol co-director and artist Jared Haug, came from the other Portland or somewhere like that, but they also brought a connection to a larger art world that our Portland is missing. Not to say that the artists here aren't amazing or haven't broken through local, regional and national ceilings, but there aren't many places a conceptual artist can go to get their groove on. Border Patrol is one of those places and I'm thankful it exists. (I'm being required to include a disclaimer with this review: I had a solo show at Border Patrol. Mmm, think it was two shows before this one. In light of that, I hope you don't mind if I get freaky but I also want to give Border Patrol their due respect. It's an important gallery and obviously I think so which is why I showed there.)

With the current show, WILD FAMILY, there's a breadth of materials that feels deceptively large. This makes sense because it's about creating a world. A world where women rule. From the artifactual sculptures of Cammie Staros to the handmade stationary by Erin Elyse Burns, this is a world with intention. Looking at the definition of intention as the healing process of a wound, I wonder if women can save us. If this show is any indication then the answer is yes. 

Conceptual art ain't always easy to understand. As an artist and as a man I sympathize with the dude I once heard say he hated art that required an explanation. But when the person doing the explaining is Elizabeth Spavento and the experience of transferring the history around a specific piece and its connection to native women is part of its design — yes, artist Demian DinéYazhi' required her to literally tell gallery viewers about #DecolonizeFeminism Poster Series '94 as a condition of its exhibition — then sorry buddy, enjoy your figure drawings, 'cause I'm over here trying to learn just what it's like for a girl. School's in session. 

If there was one conceptual artist I would tell you to study before seeing this show, it would be Felix Gonzales-Torres. I fucking love his work and any fears or discomfort I have about not understanding what conceptual art is or what a particular piece means all melt away when I see it. He's not on display here, but his legacy is present. The ability to translate something as simultaneously personal and far-reaching as the HIV pandemic is something Torres executes with materials ranging from candy to stacks of paper.

I love that a pathway to thinking about another gay male artist of color was opened to me by an exhibition that envisions a world ruled by women. It's a generous world and I admit, I feared I was too stupid to enter. Because of it and because of its form. 

Enter WILD FAMILY. 

This is the part where I'm supposed to break down what some of the pieces mean and give a few artists their due. Maybe I'm just being lazy but I really don't wanna do that. Of course I know that as a curator, Spavento wants a good review (who doesn't?). But I think it's more so that I don't want to bullshit you, the reader, with some polemics that lay claim to understanding. I feel like I don't know shit about this and I'm embarrassed by the ways I haven't had to know. What I can do is say I'm willing to listen and learn about something I benefit from everyday: the labor of women. Women who rule.

I do like to occasionally spill the tea though, so fuck it. 

There's some tactile elements in this show that are giving me life. I'm not kidding when I say I feared I would be too dumb to understand this show, even before I knew it was about women (which then made me feel extra dumb). Upon entry I encountered Courtney Kemp's Vanities and Victories and thought Oh fuck, what is this? There are elements that are familiar, but the combination of materials is throwing me way off. I didn't know how to enter the world of it. That's because I had only been experiencing it with sight. With just a little direction from Elizabeth who invited me to touch it, my experience of the work completely changed. With consent. No, something else. Invitation. Which has me thinking all about consent and how as a man I was so ready to dismiss something I perceived as not being immediately accessible to me.

I would like to give some props to Elizabeth Atterbury. I see you, Elizabeth. Her work to me has always had a misty muted technicolor streak that has to do with nothing if not place and memory. I gagged when I heard she had made the offering here, sand-coated objects that look like miniature world wonders, elemental and built to last. I was surprised because I had always known her as a photographer so it was like oh hey girl, you made the leap to sculpture. I haven't followed her work closely over the years, but it wasn't for lack of interest; moreso knowing that as an artist she was not going away anytime soon and that when the time was right I'd be all up in it. I'm not much of a seeker but I stay ready to receive anything by Elizabeth Atterbury. I know she flirted with experiments in form early on and had been looking at ways to expand the boundaries of the picture frame. I got the low down from Spavento that this work is Atterbury's snapshot of motherhood through the architectural and topographic impressions of her Florida upbringing, reclaimed monuments to time and space. You go, girl — but please not back to Florida. 

The breadcrumbs that connected me to the memory of Felix Gonzales-Torres were Atterbury's piece Let it go, let it go, let it go followed by the work of Erin Elyse Burns, a series of display shelves with carefully crafted funerary boxes containing messages that immediate conjure what the artist refers to as "the incomplete communications existent throughout our lives." They let me know that as man, as a queer artist of color, as someone grappling with my own struggles and triumphs, I'd be okay in this WILD FAMILY.

Similar to the NYC-based queer women’s artist collective Fierce Pussy’s urgency around creating visibility through accessible means (Xerox-copied posters), Demian DinéYazhi' utilizes agitprop in an aesthetic and directed play with motif, information and performance. I love this piece but I also feel the most othered by it, conscious of my masculinity somehow. It unveils my own limited knowledge of the history of feminism. Even though it’s made by a queer artist, the fact that they are male feels like a side door into a world I didn’t earn the right to witness. At the time of this writing, I don’t even know if they are the only male in the show, but I know my ears piqued when Spavento informed me he was a he. I think I may have asked. I was relieved the show depicted a world that didn’t exclude men but ashamed of that relief somehow. Ashamed that I hadn’t done the homework required to earn my place among women like he had and that’s why I was on the outside looking in. Coveting his place just like a damn dude. And yet this piece informs me this is exactly why I’m here: to learn. #DecolonizeFeminism Poster Series transforms the passive viewer by inviting us to participate in the resistance to the ways Indigenous women’s voices have been erased. The use of performance with the curator being required to describe the work is brilliant and opens a door into a world that even other women have held closed through the whitewashing of feminism. 

Okay, moving right along. So black women and why their work is important. Um, duh. Get the fuck out of here if you don't agree with that. Zakkiyyah Najeebah shows us the door with this simple video De(liberate) featuring Nina Simone, Toni Morrison and Sister Souljah. As art, it gets out of the way of itself, and as a contribution to the exhibition is yet another pathway that connected to moments in the history of black cultural production that I don’t get enough of in my life. Hello pathways. Who knew a world ruled by women would have so many. 

According to the curatorial statement for the show, “WILD FAMILY is dedicated to memories, representations, and imaginings of matriarchy. Named after a 1510 drawing by artist Albrecht Altdorfer, this exhibition imagines a world in which women rule ... the exhibition uses (Alfdorfer’s) drawing as a framing mechanism as both an alternate history and as a dissection of patriarchy. Like Altdorfer, the works on display de-naturalize current power relationships while conjuring the arrival of a transformed landscape. Assuming that historical representations contain kernels of worlds to come, WILD FAMILY stumbles toward a suffusion of female energy.”

Okay, shit is about to get real. There’s a pitfall in conceptual art. You can’t un-know something. It’s like a movie by M. Night Shyamalan. The knowing stays fun but it never matches the thrill of that first reveal. That’s a best-case scenario. The worst case is that the dude who hates conceptual art because it has to be explained will say “story or not, this piece sucks.” Spavento’s three drawings don’t suck. But before I knew the stories behind them, I did notice their departure from a world that otherwise felt more tightly crafted. And this is purely about taste here. Which even talking about my taste like it matters more than what I’m ostensibly “tasting” makes me feel like a lip-smacking sex trafficker who buys and sells women. I have to rearrange my thinking if I’m going to contribute to this WILD FAMILY and look at the ways that Spavento — also the curator — is pushing the materiality of the other artists forward with this ephemeral mess of gouache on paper. Hmmm…leading from the back…interesting.

Spavento’s Trandance, Was there a time? (prewar) and Where babies come from (wombroom) come off as counterpoints to the two ceramic and brass sculptures by Cammie Staros titled Siren (<>) and Siren (There Key Slow & Stead). With a nod to antiquity and archeological preservation, Staros conjures the type of forms you would see in a history museum. I think that’s why I avoided the vessel-like structures at first and why I'm thinking about them now, toward the end. There’s something sad to me about objects being put behind glass or on a pedestal that were once a vital part of people’s everyday lives. A closer look through the fear of erasure, I see that they are actually vibrant and strong objects imbued with a figurative vitality, recalling ancient forms and a world where their creation and use still exists. Staros writes in her artist statement that “by encouraging consideration of both the art-object and the self-as-object, I hope to compare ways that art and bodies are displayed, looking and being looked at.” In light of that, it makes sense I found myself questioning my own gaze and how that gaze was transformed by acceptance of not what this work looks like but what it could be — a body, a tool — much like way we view other people and brush up against our ideas of who they might be, how qualities like their strength or fragility are performed, inhabited or seen.”

The video work by Nika Kaiser, I really love. It felt very personal. Seeing the woman in the video interact with the landscape recalls the physical sensation of sand, ocean, how you feel your body in a different way when interacting with the elements. There's a performative revolution around the natural environment, the body and the use of visual evidence as storytelling that takes me back to the late Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. Where many of Mendieta's earth/body sculptures occurred privately with documentary photographs of the performative work being all that remained, the audience is allowed to see the woman in Kaiser as she traverses the landscape with a furrowed brow that says: this is the business, the business of what Spavento describes (in reference to the figures in the 1510 drawing by Albrecht Altdorfer that the exhibition is named after) what it takes to not exploit the natural environment but rather participate within it.

I thought I was too dumb and male to understand this show until I realized all you have to do in this WILD FAMILY is to receive the wisdom, strength and beauty offered by the women who rule it. 

WILD FAMILY, group exhibition | Through October 28 | Border Patrol, 142 High St. Ste 309, Portland | info@border-patrol.net

Derek Jackson can be reached at hitiger.me@gmail.com

It started like any art opening: A small crowd gathered outside, many of them holding coffee due to the early hour, standing and mingling. Some were artists themselves, others were more the outdoorsy-type wearing Patagonia jackets and sports sandals. They laughed and talked while waiting for the doors to open.

But the doors didn’t open. Instead, the Elizabeth Grace, a water taxi, pulled up to the Portland Yacht Services dock, and the laughing, talking, and mingling moved on board.

The boat was bound for Little Chebeague and Surface First Tilts West, an art show that eschews the gallery in favor of the trees, meadows, beaches, and hiking paths of an island in Casco Bay. Described as an “experiential exhibition,” Surface First is an outdoor installation, a collection of prints, sculptures, paintings, writings, and recordings left to fend for themselves in the elements. They dot the sandbar that at low tide connects Little Chebeague to Great Chebeague. They hang spinning inside the rusting fire training structure that sits atop Chandler Cove. They hide inside plexiglass boxes among the ruins of former houses and cottages. And they sit suspended from trees.

The work comes from several artists, among whom lead curator Jordan Kendall Parks is also one. She tucked one of her favorite woodcuts into a rough wooden case and left it to weather in Maine's September rains. Jared Haug sculpted huge seashells out of foam and fiberglass, then chained them to cinder blocks and tossed them below the low-tide mark, leaving them to rise and fall with the water. The words of writer Jennifer O'Connell hang on translucent fabric, draped from the spread arms of an oak tree. Isabel Neal’s words sit sandwiched in prints that twist and sway with every breeze. And Chris Battaglia’s work is ongoing, capturing the installation in stills and video, documenting the weathering of the island and its art.

What is the point of installing art on an uninhabited island? Parks says it's meant to bring visitors and add to Little Chebeague’s juxtaposition of natural and man-made, of the past and the present. Each piece was placed conspicuously, the spot chosen because of how the light fell on it, or how the trees swayed, or what ruins lay around it. And in sitting there, in filling that space, the art enhanced it. The green of grass and leaves looked greener in contrast, the black and white prints striking by comparison. The sunlight dances on draped canvas, changing as the day progressed and as the season slips toward fall. A walk around the island is like watching a dance. The light and the wind and the water and artists are playing together. Each installation flirts with its surroundings, each swaying and mirroring the other.

But the flirting is temporary. The art is tenuous, fragile, never made to last. Every breeze threatens to rip or topple; every rising tide threatens to sweep away. The end result is a teetering feeling, a celebration of the fleeting nature of things. Cast alongside the art pieces, even the foundations of long-destroyed buildings seem momentary. A print is no more everlasting than an old car chassis sitting rusting in a field. Everything we build is temporary. Only the island endures — the sand, the trees, the streaming sunlight, the giant oak with its limbs spread wide as if holding the sky.

But without the art, without each exhibit, the island fades to a backdrop. It becomes just an island again, one of so many in Casco Bay they have been compared to the days in a calendar. Surface First Tilts West draws Little Chebeague out, pulling it from obscurity to center stage. The installation might be the point of visiting, but really the art is only the opening act. The main event is an island, steadfast, quiet, and majestic.

Surface First Tilts West remains on display until September 30. But to see the show can be tricky, as there is no direct ferry service to the island. At low tide, Little Chebeague is connected to Great Chebeague by a sandbar, which makes a quick visit possible. It is best to get to the sandbar about two hours before the lowest point in the tide cycle. Casco Bay Ferry Lines runs multiple trips to Great Chebeague daily, and the sandbar is a short walk from the pier.

It is also possible to take a private boat or kayak to Little Chebeague, which is part of the Maine Island Trail Association network of islands. Camping is also allowed. More information is available at mita.org

With Speedwell Projects’ current exhibition The Loved Ones, photographs by Smith Galtney of Maine and Matthew Papa of New York City, I wondered whether I could write an objective review.

Smith is a friend and I love his work. But not every relationship is perfect and some of the issues I have with ours offered perspective. For this review, I decided to let go of objectivity.

Speedwell Projects is a new gallery on outer Forest Avenue near Woodfords Corner opened by the nationally recognized photographer Jocelyn Lee. From what I’ve seen, hers is a measured and gracious force that I trust will ground this newly minted multi-use art and performance venue. Her eye is honed and has a story of its own.

The legacy represented and propelling the work shown in The Loved Ones, in both culture and production, is fully intertwined with my own. Look no further than the book of Alvin Baltrop photography on the coffee table that greets you in what is Smith’s attempt to lay a historical groundwork for the exhibition. Baltrop was under-recognized during his lifetime for his photographs from the ‘70s and ‘80s of gay black men cruising the West Side Highway piers, the center of New York City’s gay sex underground. While the visual language of this time is more evident in the subjects and poses in Matthew’s work, Smith pins it to a contemporary moment in the form of a slideshow video, schooling us on the art of deadpan photographic delivery, unadorned commitment to light and inside views of domesticity.

Photograph by Smith Galtney

Let’s rewind to right before I’m getting ready to see the exhibition. The routine is familiar: eat a balanced meal, pack an extra layer, park my bicycle at least a block away so that I have time to prepare myself to be surrounded by a room full of white dudes. Smith greeted me as soon as I entered.

Before even looking at the work I ask, “So what about race?” Of course, he fumbles nervously. Then he replies. “I love photography,” he says, and adds something about just trying to be a decent human being. Before even seeing the show, I went into this all hung up on the issue of naming in the context of identity politics. The press release introduces The Loved Ones as a show by two gay photographers. That’s it. Just two gay photographers. So. Like. What kind of gay? Would it be like black and brown fem bodies dancing to fierce house music and burning incense? No? Not that type of gay? Oh right, the middle-aged white dude type of gay. The default.

This is hard to explain. “Gay white male” is more specific than just gay. Just gay assumes whiteness (unless there are black artists present, then it would be othered and called a gay black show). But what’s more specific than gay white male — and this is the point I’m trying to make — are Smith and Matthew’s individual visions. So at first glance, the show looks very gay white male. I’m mostly talking about the audience — the people who came to the reception and the legacy the work is coming from. Looking again, there is some gender and ethnic diversity. The show doesn’t feel as white as the framing of it did in its press release and advertising. But that too is interesting — that presumption of whiteness.

I know Smith. I have collaborated with him, and while I may not look like the middle-aged gay white man represented in this exhibition, I know his ways and have been supported by his work. We have overlapping themes in our work as artists which reference the way gay men cruise for casual intimacy and negotiate acceptance. I see the Matthew Papa photographs and their daring nod to art created in a time when sex could first mean death. I know what it feels like to fight for something only to be told that it can now kill you.

What about you? Did you know about a sea of gay white dudes in the Castro, rising and falling in the alternating triumph of sexual liberation and the caustic ruin of AIDS? Did you also know about their dance parties and political tirades? The press release describes Smith and Matthew as two gay artists. Why is whiteness left out as an assumed default?

Keep it real and call it what it is — two middle-aged gay white dudes taking photos on fairly opposite ends of the respectability spectrum. One takes them as a way of documenting a settled and pedestrian middle-aged gay married life (Galtney) and the other makes images with nudes and ephemerality (Papa). If you’re gonna name something, don’t beat around the identity bush — name it! If this is “gay white male” culture, then it is one with a history that overlaps with my own (and many others’). Will these labels help us see in these photographs the heartbreaking beauty in what it means to forge ahead? To live? To die? To be seen? To celebrate and to hesitate? To be human and to be loved? This is the legacy I see living and breathing in this work. Whether or not it belongs to the identity and culture of gay white men is a question that will have to sit alongside the historical importance and quiet bravery on display.

The Loved Ones, photography by Smith Galtney & Matthew Papa | Through September 1 | SPEEDWELL Projects, 630 Forest Ave., Portland | Tues-Sat 2-6pm | Artist talk July 28 5:30pm

In a show that feels both formally radical and historically reverent, Selvedge — on view now at Able Baker Contemporary — grapples with the practice of painting through a new lens. The nine women’s works shown in this exhibition — including Portland painter and muralist Tessa Greene O’Brien, who began curating it last November — share in their effort to sublimate the process of painting through methods and practices associated with textile-making.

This allows an innovation into the form that these welltrained painters deploy affectingly, but the idea itself is hardly new. O’Brien makes studious mention of historical influences, most notably the Support/Surfaces art movement originating in the south of France in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Bound together by political disenfranchisement, Support/Surfaces artists sought to deconstruct the medium by isolating and modulating its core components of medium, support, and surface, sloughing off historical references, representation, or intentional expressions of sentiment.

Maria Molteni, Tennis Panties, 2016, sewn cotton, athletic mesh, fringe, tennis balls

Ranging in age from 21 to sixty something and each coming from a strong pedigree, it may nonetheless be a stretch to say this show’s artists share political sentiments as strong as their forebears. On the other hand, any consideration of textiles as a fine art form intersecting with the capital-e Establishment history of painting (clumped together as it is by innumerable male idols) is political in its own right. To employing the medium and process of textile- and fabric-making imbues the show with the historical weight of the labors of women the world over — from those working from factories in Iran during the Shah’s rule to the African-American slave women quiltmakers of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, to women working in textile mills in colonial New England.

Given that historical weight, viewing Selvedge is surprisingly an enjoyable, often playful affair. Maria Molteni’s Untitled (Painted Tennis Net), a 13-foot climbing rope with cargo/tennis knots and vibrantly neon-green acrylic paint, registers as a sort of aesthetic mashup of the works of Alex Da Corte and ‘70s French artist Daniel Dezeuze. Erica Licea-Kane’s series of acrylic pigment on acrylic fabric are busy and linear, their tight webbing striking a balance between earthy mosaics and De Stijl arithmetics. And the light, inventive works of Maine College of Art grad Isabelle O’Donnell nod toward, among others, Portland artist and educator Elizabeth Jabar’s work in this field.

Martha Tuttle, Weather (3), 2017, wool, silk, dye

The handwoven, tactile pieces of Martha Tuttle are some of the shows most inviting highlights. A series titled Like Water I Have No Skin merges wool, silk, and natural dyes in muted, serene color fields, as does the painterly and arrestingly calming Weather (3), a structure of light, free-hanging fabric bound together by weights and pins. Gauzy and ethereal, it’s one of the best representations of the show’s conceit, effortlessly conveying how simple layered textiles can change the way artists approach the medium of paint (and vice versa). Similarly, Beth Kleene’s 4 Eyes in the gallery window, a 50” x 44” tapestry of bright orange acrylic, ink, and hand-dyed cotton fabric, fuses the Portland artist’s typically splashy and jewel-like paintings with the quiet hypnotic finesse of 20th-century quilt work.

A collection of odder, smaller, and less serious-seeming works is peppered along a “salon wall” in the main floor, helping to further articulate the act of textile work through the lens of painting. Notable among them are Cassie Jones’s vibrantly distinct series of acrylic, felt, and staples on panel. To non-artists — and I mean this as a mark of distinction — Jones’s pieces might look as if they’re ripped right out of a Teletubbies episode, but that’s a testament to their playful execution, imaginative coloration, and brilliant deployment of shape and contour. I’m told Jones doesn’t make work like this anymore, but their inclusion here is another helpful illustration of the show’s ideas.

Susan Metrican, Worm Through Here, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 50” X 40”

O’Brien perhaps too modestly includes only two of her own pieces here. A gifted painter and muralist whose use of color typically dazzles, her stuff in Selvedge first seemed to me to be uncharacteristically dowdy and dark. But both pieces — the rugged coveralls-as-color field trick of Bonanza and the dyed canvas cushion flecked with different blots of paint she’s titled Painting for Bella — are impossible to assess without imagining the sweat put into them, and smartly add a bit of grit to the overall palette. After all, having produced a dazzling show that honors art traditions having as much to do with labor as invention, she’s definitely done the work.

Selvedge, mixed media group exhibition | Through August 5 | At Able Baker Contemporary, 29 Forest Ave., Portland | Thu-Sat 1-5:30pm |  www.ablebakercontemporary.com

Nick Schroeder can be reached at nick@portlandphoenix.me

Since she first appeared as a student in MECA’s Graduate Studies painting program, I’ve been a huge fan of Michel Droge’s work. Her thick, hazy, metallic-seeming paintings held both darkness and light as well as anyone in the state (not named Dozier Bell). But “Hiraeth,” her short-stay exhibition of cyanotypes and embossings, Droge takes a left turn into a different medium and intention.

In an artist statement, Droge defines “hiraeth,” a Welsh term, as “a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost pieces of your past.” A year prior to when she began the work that would end up in this exhibition, Droge’s brother died of an opiate overdose. “Everything familiar had come undone. I was navigated uncharted waters,” she writes. “I began a series of prints based on the idea of unraveling an Aran sweater.”

Those prints are included here, as well as numerous cyanotypes and several pieces that seem to serve as a stand-in for the sweater itself.

Haunting and apparitional, Droge’s work in Hiraeth is vibrantly nostalgic. With a primary color palette of white and aqua, the show conveys a nautical theme, the images vaguely recalling fisherman’s maps and navigational charts. Droge and her brother grew up sailing on the water. They’d spend summers on Block Island.

Droge came to study at MECA in 2009, and as she recalls it, kept to herself about the heavier themes of the past year that had been informing her work. She says that even as she was making the embossings and occasionally showing them in town, she’d never really talked about the work’s connection to her brother. “I would just talk really vaguely about the universal feeling of being lost at sea.”

Years later, Droge made cyanotypes working with the same themes and materials, a set of stick chart drawings she says “helped navigate emotional and unconscious waters.” A photographic printing process that ammonium iron citrate and potassium ferricyanide, cyanotype prints emerge a cyan-blue hue, squarely in the register of marine aesthetics. Relative to other methods of printing, the image tends to fade when exposed to the basic elements.

Printed, the crudely formed stick charts took on constellatory patterns, and she combined them with the sweaters and embossings for a three-pronged exploration of what the artist describes as the unconscious emotional realm she’s navigated since her brother’s passing.

Droge wonders if the story behind this work overshadows its universality, but her exhibition at the airy, well-lit Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick, is simple and inviting. Frayed ends of the cable-knit sweater appear in the cyanotype “Shoals” as the distant shores of land masses, with narrow isthmuses curling off the frame. In “Prophecy,” we see the white form and outline of the sweater as though its arms are raised up in surrender. In the cyanotype “Thief,” the sweater-sleeve imprint conjoins with a bed of stars imprinted from the stick charts.

As an educator who encourages young artists to engage with the coastline and its various storylines, from the effects of climate change on working life to the drug problem in coastal communities, Droge’s exhibit here is without question the most personal we’ve seen from her. It’s harrowing stuff, even with its macabre themes soundly sublimated into an art medium, the cyanotype, that could otherwise be described as angelic. Viewers would enjoy it even without knowing the whole story, its universality is indeed strong. But for those who might grapple with the work in particular terms, it’s as life-affirming as it gets.

Hiraeth, works on paper by Michel Droge | Through Aug 31 | At the Frank Brockman Gallery, 68 Maine St, Brunswick

You wanna know about Border Patrol? I'll tell you about Border Patrol. Elizabeth Spavento came here a year or two ago to head the visual art programming at SPACE Gallery. She and her partner, Border Patrol co-director and artist Jared Haug, came from the other Portland or somewhere like that, but they also brought a connection to a larger art world that our Portland is missing. Not to say that the artists here aren't amazing or haven't broken through local, regional and national ceilings, but there aren't many places a conceptual artist can go to get their groove on. Border Patrol is one of those places and I'm thankful it exists. (I'm being required to include a disclaimer with this review: I had a solo show at Border Patrol. Mmm, think it was two shows before this one. In light of that, I hope you don't mind if I get freaky but I also want to give Border Patrol their due respect. It's an important gallery and obviously I think so which is why I showed there.)

With the current show, WILD FAMILY, there's a breadth of materials that feels deceptively large. This makes sense because it's about creating a world. A world where women rule. From the artifactual sculptures of Cammie Staros to the handmade stationary by Erin Elyse Burns, this is a world with intention. Looking at the definition of intention as the healing process of a wound, I wonder if women can save us. If this show is any indication then the answer is yes. 

Conceptual art ain't always easy to understand. As an artist and as a man I sympathize with the dude I once heard say he hated art that required an explanation. But when the person doing the explaining is Elizabeth Spavento and the experience of transferring the history around a specific piece and its connection to native women is part of its design — yes, artist Demian DinéYazhi' required her to literally tell gallery viewers about #DecolonizeFeminism Poster Series '94 as a condition of its exhibition — then sorry buddy, enjoy your figure drawings, 'cause I'm over here trying to learn just what it's like for a girl. School's in session. 

If there was one conceptual artist I would tell you to study before seeing this show, it would be Felix Gonzales-Torres. I fucking love his work and any fears or discomfort I have about not understanding what conceptual art is or what a particular piece means all melt away when I see it. He's not on display here, but his legacy is present. The ability to translate something as simultaneously personal and far-reaching as the HIV pandemic is something Torres executes with materials ranging from candy to stacks of paper.

I love that a pathway to thinking about another gay male artist of color was opened to me by an exhibition that envisions a world ruled by women. It's a generous world and I admit, I feared I was too stupid to enter. Because of it and because of its form. 

Enter WILD FAMILY. 

In First Light (2017) by Erin Elyse Burns

This is the part where I'm supposed to break down what some of the pieces mean and give a few artists their due. Maybe I'm just being lazy but I really don't wanna do that. Of course I know that as a curator, Spavento wants a good review (who doesn't?). But I think it's more so that I don't want to bullshit you, the reader, with some polemics that lay claim to understanding. I feel like I don't know shit about this and I'm embarrassed by the ways I haven't had to know. What I can do is say I'm willing to listen and learn about something I benefit from everyday: the labor of women. Women who rule.

I do like to occasionally spill the tea though, so fuck it. 

There's some tactile elements in this show that are giving me life. I'm not kidding when I say I feared I would be too dumb to understand this show, even before I knew it was about women (which then made me feel extra dumb). Upon entry I encountered Courtney Kemp's Vanities and Victories and thought Oh fuck, what is this? There are elements that are familiar, but the combination of materials is throwing me way off. I didn't know how to enter the world of it. That's because I had only been experiencing it with sight. With just a little direction from Elizabeth who invited me to touch it, my experience of the work completely changed. With consent. No, something else. Invitation. Which has me thinking all about consent and how as a man I was so ready to dismiss something I perceived as not being immediately accessible to me.

I would like to give some props to Elizabeth Atterbury. I see you, Elizabeth. Her work to me has always had a misty muted technicolor streak that has to do with nothing if not place and memory. I gagged when I heard she had made the offering here, sand-coated objects that look like miniature world wonders, elemental and built to last. I was surprised because I had always known her as a photographer so it was like oh hey girl, you made the leap to sculpture. I haven't followed her work closely over the years, but it wasn't for lack of interest; moreso knowing that as an artist she was not going away anytime soon and that when the time was right I'd be all up in it. I'm not much of a seeker but I stay ready to receive anything by Elizabeth Atterbury. I know she flirted with experiments in form early on and had been looking at ways to expand the boundaries of the picture frame. I got the low down from Spavento that this work is Atterbury's snapshot of motherhood through the architectural and topographic impressions of her Florida upbringing, reclaimed monuments to time and space. You go, girl — but please not back to Florida. 

The breadcrumbs that connected me to the memory of Felix Gonzales-Torres were Atterbury's piece Let it go, let it go, let it go followed by the work of Erin Elyse Burns, a series of display shelves with carefully crafted funerary boxes containing messages that immediate conjure what the artist refers to as "the incomplete communications existent throughout our lives." They let me know that as man, as a queer artist of color, as someone grappling with my own struggles and triumphs, I'd be okay in this WILD FAMILY.

Similar to the NYC-based queer women’s artist collective Fierce Pussy’s urgency around creating visibility through accessible means (Xerox-copied posters), Demian DinéYazhi' utilizes agitprop in an aesthetic and directed play with motif, information and performance. I love this piece but I also feel the most othered by it, conscious of my masculinity somehow. It unveils my own limited knowledge of the history of feminism. Even though it’s made by a queer artist, the fact that they are male feels like a side door into a world I didn’t earn the right to witness. At the time of this writing, I don’t even know if they are the only male in the show, but I know my ears piqued when Spavento informed me he was a he. I think I may have asked. I was relieved the show depicted a world that didn’t exclude men but ashamed of that relief somehow. Ashamed that I hadn’t done the homework required to earn my place among women like he had and that’s why I was on the outside looking in. Coveting his place just like a damn dude. And yet this piece informs me this is exactly why I’m here: to learn. #DecolonizeFeminism Poster Series transforms the passive viewer by inviting us to participate in the resistance to the ways Indigenous women’s voices have been erased. The use of performance with the curator being required to describe the work is brilliant and opens a door into a world that even other women have held closed through the whitewashing of feminism. [Ed: Per Spavento, a portion of sales of Demian DinéYazhi's work will be donated to the Indigenous Action Network.]

Okay, moving right along. So black women and why their work is important. Um, duh. Get the fuck out of here if you don't agree with that. Zakkiyyah Najeebah shows us the door with this simple video De(liberate) featuring Nina Simone, Toni Morrison and Sister Souljah. As art, it gets out of the way of itself, and as a contribution to the exhibition is yet another pathway that connected to moments in the history of black cultural production that I don’t get enough of in my life. Hello pathways. Who knew a world ruled by women would have so many. 

According to the curatorial statement for the show, “WILD FAMILY is dedicated to memories, representations, and imaginings of matriarchy. Named after a 1510 drawing by artist Albrecht Altdorfer, this exhibition imagines a world in which women rule ... the exhibition uses (Alfdorfer’s) drawing as a framing mechanism as both an alternate history and as a dissection of patriarchy. Like Altdorfer, the works on display de-naturalize current power relationships while conjuring the arrival of a transformed landscape. Assuming that historical representations contain kernels of worlds to come, WILD FAMILY stumbles toward a suffusion of female energy.”

Okay, shit is about to get real. There’s a pitfall in conceptual art. You can’t un-know something. It’s like a movie by M. Night Shyamalan. The knowing stays fun but it never matches the thrill of that first reveal. That’s a best-case scenario. The worst case is that the dude who hates conceptual art because it has to be explained will say “story or not, this piece sucks.” Spavento’s three drawings don’t suck. But before I knew the stories behind them, I did notice their departure from a world that otherwise felt more tightly crafted. And this is purely about taste here. Which even talking about my taste like it matters more than what I’m ostensibly “tasting” makes me feel like a lip-smacking sex trafficker who buys and sells women. I have to rearrange my thinking if I’m going to contribute to this WILD FAMILY and look at the ways that Spavento — also the curator — is pushing the materiality of the other artists forward with this ephemeral mess of gouache on paper. Hmmm…leading from the back…interesting.

Spavento’s Transtrance (for Kajanne Pepper) and Where babies come from (wombroom) come off as counterpoints to the two ceramic and brass sculptures by Cammie Staros titled Siren (<>) and Siren (There Key Slow & Stead). With a nod to antiquity and archeological preservation, Staros conjures the type of forms you would see in a history museum. I think that’s why I avoided the vessel-like structures at first and why I'm thinking about them now, toward the end. There’s something sad to me about objects being put behind glass or on a pedestal that were once a vital part of people’s everyday lives. A closer look through the fear of erasure, I see that they are actually vibrant and strong objects imbued with a figurative vitality, recalling ancient forms and a world where their creation and use still exists. Staros writes in her artist statement that “by encouraging consideration of both the art-object and the self-as-object, I hope to compare ways that art and bodies are displayed, looking and being looked at.” In light of that, it makes sense I found myself questioning my own gaze and how that gaze was transformed by acceptance of not what this work looks like but what it could be — a body, a tool — much like way we view other people and brush up against our ideas of who they might be, how qualities like their strength or fragility are performed, inhabited or seen.

The video work by Nika Kaiser, I really love. It felt very personal. Seeing the woman in the video interact with the landscape recalls the physical sensation of sand, ocean, how you feel your body in a different way when interacting with the elements. There's a performative revolution around the natural environment, the body and the use of visual evidence as storytelling that takes me back to the late Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. Where many of Mendieta's earth/body sculptures occurred privately with documentary photographs of the performative work being all that remained, the audience is allowed to see the woman in Kaiser as she traverses the landscape with a furrowed brow that says: this is the business, the business of what Spavento describes (in reference to the figures in the 1510 drawing by Albrecht Altdorfer that the exhibition is named after) what it takes to not exploit the natural environment but rather participate within it.

I thought I was too dumb and male to understand this show until I realized all you have to do in this WILD FAMILY is to receive the wisdom, strength and beauty offered by the women who rule it. 

WILD FAMILY, group exhibition | Through October 28 | Border Patrol, 142 High St. Ste 309, Portland | info@border-patrol.net

Derek Jackson can be reached at hitiger.me@gmail.com

It started like any art opening: A small crowd gathered outside, many of them holding coffee due to the early hour, standing and mingling. Some were artists themselves, others were more the outdoorsy-type wearing Patagonia jackets and sports sandals. They laughed and talked while waiting for the doors to open.

But the doors didn’t open. Instead, the Elizabeth Grace, a water taxi, pulled up to the Portland Yacht Services dock, and the laughing, talking, and mingling moved on board.

The boat was bound for Little Chebeague and Surface First Tilts West, an art show that eschews the gallery in favor of the trees, meadows, beaches, and hiking paths of an island in Casco Bay. Described as an “experiential exhibition,” Surface First is an outdoor installation, a collection of prints, sculptures, paintings, writings, and recordings left to fend for themselves in the elements. They dot the sandbar that at low tide connects Little Chebeague to Great Chebeague. They hang spinning inside the rusting fire training structure that sits atop Chandler Cove. They hide inside plexiglass boxes among the ruins of former houses and cottages. And they sit suspended from trees.

The work comes from several artists, among whom lead curator Jordan Kendall Parks is also one. She tucked one of her favorite woodcuts into a rough wooden case and left it to weather in Maine's September rains. Jared Haug sculpted huge seashells out of foam and fiberglass, then chained them to cinder blocks and tossed them below the low-tide mark, leaving them to rise and fall with the water. The words of writer Jennifer O'Connell hang on translucent fabric, draped from the spread arms of an oak tree. Isabel Neal’s words sit sandwiched in prints that twist and sway with every breeze. And Chris Battaglia’s work is ongoing, capturing the installation in stills and video, documenting the weathering of the island and its art.

What is the point of installing art on an uninhabited island? Parks says it's meant to bring visitors and add to Little Chebeague’s juxtaposition of natural and man-made, of the past and the present. Each piece was placed conspicuously, the spot chosen because of how the light fell on it, or how the trees swayed, or what ruins lay around it. And in sitting there, in filling that space, the art enhanced it. The green of grass and leaves looked greener in contrast, the black and white prints striking by comparison. The sunlight dances on draped canvas, changing as the day progressed and as the season slips toward fall. A walk around the island is like watching a dance. The light and the wind and the water and artists are playing together. Each installation flirts with its surroundings, each swaying and mirroring the other.

But the flirting is temporary. The art is tenuous, fragile, never made to last. Every breeze threatens to rip or topple; every rising tide threatens to sweep away. The end result is a teetering feeling, a celebration of the fleeting nature of things. Cast alongside the art pieces, even the foundations of long-destroyed buildings seem momentary. A print is no more everlasting than an old car chassis sitting rusting in a field. Everything we build is temporary. Only the island endures — the sand, the trees, the streaming sunlight, the giant oak with its limbs spread wide as if holding the sky.

But without the art, without each exhibit, the island fades to a backdrop. It becomes just an island again, one of so many in Casco Bay they have been compared to the days in a calendar. Surface First Tilts West draws Little Chebeague out, pulling it from obscurity to center stage. The installation might be the point of visiting, but really the art is only the opening act. The main event is an island, steadfast, quiet, and majestic.

Surface First Tilts West remains on display until September 30. But to see the show can be tricky, as there is no direct ferry service to the island. At low tide, Little Chebeague is connected to Great Chebeague by a sandbar, which makes a quick visit possible. It is best to get to the sandbar about two hours before the lowest point in the tide cycle. Casco Bay Ferry Lines runs multiple trips to Great Chebeague daily, and the sandbar is a short walk from the pier.

It is also possible to take a private boat or kayak to Little Chebeague, which is part of the Maine Island Trail Association network of islands. Camping is also allowed. More information is available at mita.org

This weekend, the second annual New England Art Book Fair embalms SPACE Gallery with a parade of imaginative print works, subterranean obsessions, sociopolitical samizdat, and next-level art works. Launched by Portland artists Samantha Haedrich, Adam Stockman, Jimmy Viera, Andrew Scripter, and Pilar Nadal, fans of tactile art will have two days to poke around, from Friday night's art walk and all day Saturday, exploring art books that "explore the convergence of publishing, art, identity, and storytelling."

Offering dozens of vendors and makers from around the country, here are five you should look out for:

Publication: The Tonebook

Artist/publisher: Inpatient Press

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Description: A collection of experimental musical scores from contemporary composers and performers

Format: 10" x 12" paperback

Price: $30

Publication Name: Inferno Zine #1

Artist/publisher: Kyle Quinn/Raw Meat

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Description: Earlier this year, Kyle Quinn ran a Polaroid photo booth for a Queer sex party in the heart of Brooklyn called Inferno. Quinn says, "I photographed the first couple of parties and got an amazing response from the community and attendees involved. This zine, released on my publishing label Raw Meat, is the documentation of the beauty in all bodies within this party and special setting."

Format/media: Raw Meat offers limited edition books, zines, prints and objects.

Price: $25

Publication: En Route to Find an Armchair

Artist/publisher: Lindsay Buchman

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Description: En Route to Find an Armchair investigates the limits of language and the malleability of memory through lens-based media and creative writing. It consists of a dialogue between two subjects – ‘reader’ and ‘you’ – that exist within a nonlinear narrative. Laden with subtexts, En Route examines relationships between sight and site, between desire and loss, and between language and communication. 

Format/medium: laser-print book, edition 30, 2017

Price: $40

Publication: HOMOCATS

Artist: J. Morrison

Location: Brooklyn, NY

Description: Created by Brooklyn artist J. Morrison in 2010, HOMOCATS is a visual art project appropriating the modern popularity of the feline. We aim to fight phobias, propose equal rights, combat cultural stereotypes, challenge social norms, and resist Trump.  

Format/media: Zines, artist books, t-shirts and bags

Price: $5-50

Publication: (H)afrocentric Comics: Volumes 1-4, by Juliana "Jewels" Smith

Publisher: PM Press

Location: Oakland, CA

Description: An unflinching visual and literary tour-de-force on the most pressing issues of the day— including gentrification, police violence, and housing — with humor and biting satire.

Format: paperback

Price: $20

The New England Art Book Fair | October 6-7 | Fri 5-9 pm; Sat 10 am-5 pm | SPACE Gallery, 538 Congress St. | www.space538.org 

Whenever I go to see a show by a black artist in a primarily white institution I find myself questioning whether I will be distracted by a white gaze and curatorial context. Will I resist an idea of blackness because I perceive that it has been selected for me by a non-black gatekeeper imbued with the white power to decide which blacks are elevated to the canons of art history? I don’t know the skin color of the curator at Bowdoin’s Museum of Art; for all I know this year’s student enrollment could have been majority non-white. What I do know is that the Barkley Hendrick's show is a gift to our community’s creative consciousness.

By community, I mean anyone interested in painting, beauty, technique, portraiture, color, Black life in America, social commentary, post-modernity, and graphic design. So yeah, pretty much everyone. The mass appeal of these paintings is undeniable and generously revealed. The show is small but tight. Sister Lucas (1975) is framed by the entry way to the gallery. A female nude standing in the center of a rounded canvas, she is seemingly cut out of a world that the look on her face says is nothing she fears.

Once inside, the “large triple full-length” painting Northern Lights (1976) caught my eye like broken glass crushed into a city street. This is where I thought the show might lose me. From a distance the painting screams Blaxploitation, which makes me think of the '90s and how the '70s were so big then. I shuffle over as the Isley Brothers energy of Northern Lights calls out to say “now wai-a-ait a minute!” I check out the way Hendricks gets down with the fabric on this brother man’s coat like in The Princesse de Broglie. This dude is totally grounded in technique worthy of celebration and unapologetically rooted in time and place. Check out homie’s gold tooth. You just can’t deny the way Hendricks captures the light in a grill that we get to sit with, not just pass on the street.

“Toast” of Amos, 1966, oil on canvas, by Barkley Hendricks, American, 1945- 2017. Lent by a Friend of the Museum. Photo By Luc Demers

Continuing with the theme of light is Toast (1966), a close-up of a dark brown skinned man in “rich” turtle neck. The painting is almost all solid fields of brown, white, red and blue. The sitter is described as having “a pose that might suggest that he was reading a book in his lap while Hendricks observed his face.” Words like refined, delicate, thoughtful and considered all come to mind. Somewhere in the back of my head I hear a voice saying you never see black men portrayed this way. Ever. I try to push it away. It’s not true why would I even think that. I tell myself this is totally normal. I see this every day. I tell myself just focus on the scholarly young man … focus on the way Hendricks lifts the glint of light in his glasses … a tiny spark on gold rim.

Star Spangled Chitlins (1967) neatly connects historical and political dots. Maybe I’m just a negative Ned but there’s something unsettling about its beauty. It inspires a yearning for an America that is as well crafted as this painting but with the absence of a person (only a flag and chair are seen) it’s a vision of American politics and race relations that is at once all sewn up and unfinished. Hendricks called the painting FTA (1968) his most political work. Its lime-green background somehow manages to get behind an African-American man in uniform, his snarky downturned mouth gracing a beautiful black face. The title stands for Fuck the Army. According to the wall text, “This work expresses the frustration and distress among African-American citizens in uniform ordered to serve a political system that many believed did not appropriately represent them.” Like the painting itself, that’s a very nice way of putting it.

From 11th century hellenistic iconography to Yoruba ceremonial objects, the way that humans organize the visual frame around portraiture is pretty … singular. Iconography is at play in another room in the museum with the exhibit, Constructing Revolution: Soviet Propaganda Posters from between the World Wars. That show is described as containing, “some of the most iconic images in the history of graphic design.” It is clear that artists and designers were looking at this work during the '60s and '70s period of post-modernity that produced Barkley Hendricks. While some artists during that time were known for bringing the political fire to the cultural table, Hendricks brought the fire and the finesse.

Barkley Hendricks died in April of this year so your chance to meet a real live black artist working in the relevant themes of visibility and politics has passed. Friends and collectors will share memories of the artist on Thursday the 12th from 12 to 1pm. Chances are that all of us art lovers will be influenced by the work of Barkley Hendricks for generations to come.

Derek Jackson can be reached at hitiger.me@gmail.com

This week, Portland photographer Nicholas Gervin releases The Lines Don’t Lie, a sprawling and comprehensive 190-page photography book documenting a generation of Northeastern freight train graffiti art.

Inspired by Subway Art, the influential 1984 book by photographer Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant documenting New York City subway graffiti in the ‘70s and ‘80s, The Lines Don’t Lie is a sui generis piece of New England art documentation.

Three-and-a-half years in the making, Gervin's photos in The Lines Don’t Lie date his love affair with freight train graffiti art as early as 1994. Each book is handmade, and all shots were taken in New England (though the trains themselves might have come from anywhere on the continent). The pages are printed by Curry Printing in Portland, while Gervin himself is hand-binding each book.

Gervin says that nearly all shots were taken while trains were moving — typically 60 or 70 miles per hour. As a photographer (and not a practioner, he notes) of graffiti art and co-producer of recent film documentary Year-round Metal Enjoyment, released by Portland’s Mint Films’ in 2015, Gervin’s knowledge of the form and era is nearly unparalleled. With the help of Michelle Ferris, a street art documentarian (and Gervin’s fiancée) and numerous quotations and commentary from graffiti writers themselves, the book is a passionate and spirited physical documentation of a marginalized art form often shrouded by misinformation and fear.

The Phoenix met with Gervin at a Dunkin' Donuts on Forest Ave. to discuss the book, his knowledge of the history of graffiti writing, and the art form's intersections with contemporary society.

So, how did you get into this?

As a kid, I was really into comic book art. Then I started making oil paintings. I moved from South Boston to Portland and lived on Newbury Street next to an abandoned building called Crosby’s. It was covered in graffiti. I saw the art on the walls and it immediately drew me in. I would borrow my mother’s camera and take pictures. First I tried to re-draw it, but didn’t even know what any of it said. I felt like an archaeologist, decrypting codes.

Did that connect you to the larger scene and its history?

Yeah, I got really into the photographers Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant. I got a copy of Subway Art. Martha Cooper would do more like big shots, see the trains in the environment. And Henry Chalfant would do big panoramics. Back in the subway days, they used to sit on a bench and talk and watch the pieces go by [a process known as "benching" in the graffiti community].