New monographs, artist books, portfolios, and prints arriving daily. Many are not on the website yet, come see!
American Bedroom by Barbara Peacock
An exhibition and a new book.
DECEMBER 13 - JANUARY 31
Artist Talks and Book Signing: Friday, January 10, 5-8pm:
Barbara Peacock will be reading from American Bedroom.
Henri Pierre Corbacho will be reading from his first novel, Of Many Lands.
Jodi Colella will speak about her Beasts Collection
Barbara Peacock, Sven and Nicole, From the American Bedroom portfolio, 1/25, 2018, Inkjet print, 60 x 40 inches, $1,800.
‘We are tattered and distressed, emotionally wiped, just lost a baby, and repairing our relationship. We were made for each other from across the oceans, we found each other ‘ - Sven and Nicole
SOME incredible REVIEWS OF THE PROJECT:
The Phoblographer
The Guardian
CNN
My Modern Met
BuzzFeed.News
Lensculture
Bildstrecke
A Book Feature
Candace diCarlo, This Experience Does Not Exist, 1/100, 2024, Hardcover, 132 pages, 90, four color photographs, 9 x 12 inches, $85.
This Experience Does Not Exist / Landscapes with Google Earth
This might be my favorite photograph. The heliograph, taken around 1826 by Joseph Niépce, records rooftops from the window of his home in France. As the oldest known extant camera pho-tograph, it is an artifact of inchoate technology. The results of the all-day attempt to register objective reality are suggested, rather than precisely cap-tured. The fingerprints of man are reflected in the roughness and offness of the recording, and therein lies its beauty.
Today satellites and aircraft provide our rooftop view. Their programmed cameras sweep the globe, as if mowing the lawn of the earth, robotically taking millions of photos. The image data is superimposed on a 3D topographical grid over which photographed textures are laid, creating a mosaic of the world.
Google Earth’s system has been taught to define the land in a spectacular way. But like someone learning to read, mispronunciations and misreads occur. Sometimes image data misaligns with the 3D terrain data, serving up a confusion of shapes and colors, View-Master-like arrangements of field depth, and flatness where there should be three-dimensionality. At times the underlying 3D grid framework appears, and one witnesses squares of data falling into place before the complete image appears, revealing the transition between what is finally pre- sented and the structure it hangs on. In remote locations Google Earth’s low resolution satellite imagery manifests a lack of detail, as if the cameras are paint- ing with broad brush strokes, often simplifying textures with cartoonish results. The combination of algorithmic misreads and low-resolution aesthetics create rough artifacts, so similar to the ones in Niépce’s rooftops photograph, and these are the images that interest me the most.
The algorithmic hallucinations create distortions that project a tension between fact and fiction. Their offness creates a weird simulacrum of reality: the images seem otherworldly — but it’s our world. As the system algorithms improve, this group of initial recordings will most likely disappear. With this book, the pho- tographs of my simulated travels in part record a cabinet of curiosities of the re- markable, impressionistic and surreal artifacts of the technology as it now exists, before it is perfected.
Some will take issue with the virtual capture process employed here, considering these images dislocated from life, and derived from an experience that did not exist. My own psyche, however, does not object to the absence of ground level encounters. Any experience depends on the openness and imagination one brings to it. The process was as exhilarating as any of my artistic endeavors, no bonds with creativity were broken. In the years that were spent viewing Google Earth images, hundreds of miles were often covered before the recording of a particular landscape from a particular distance, angle and height. It felt similar to analog landscape experiences, where after walking or driving for a good period, one finally stops to photograph a compelling view.
The numen of this landscape series is Genesis Day 4: before birds, animals and man were created. The views depict archetypal frontiers, absent of political and social constraints, yet to be recorded by human memory. The reality, however, is that technology has shrunk the world, and no corner of it is unfamiliar. The new frontier is now technology itself.
Because the human psyche constantly craves newness and exploration, which in essence is the quest for the ideal over reality, more and more of life will beviewed through its filter. We employ cognition, common sense, and intuition to understand reality. Because our perception is attuned to our human scale, and has not developed to comprehend on a very small or large spectrum, we pene- trate a narrow range of what exists. Technology enables us to probe existence in those spheres beyond human perception, and through it we are often able to ac- cess the sublime.
On an autobiographical note, Antarctica has always held a particular fascination for me. The polar desert has an aesthetic which approaches nothingness on a visual level and everything on a spiritual plane. The main catalyst for this series was inspired by a decades-old dream. In it, I found myself in a pristine expanse of Antarctica. Though clothed with only a long red scarf, cold was nonexistent. Movement was like that of an Olympic skater, elegant and fluid, and manifest with the rapidity of thought. The effort and limitations that constrain and impede human existence were supplanted by infinite possibility and joy. I would describe the state as one of pure spirit, perfectly euphoric and enthralling. Most would say it was an experience that did not exist, but the event has served as a reference point seminal in my thinking and way of being. These photographs were my cu- rious attempt to rediscover the landscape that only existed in my mind and re- touch the phenomena it provoked. My travels began in Antarctica, then over a period of years, segued to other remote regions, eventually gravitating to the equator.
These vistas were created 2019-2023. Their making is my musical interpretation and scoring of Google Earth’s data. Viewing the world from hundreds of miles above is sublime. The experience novelly displays Earth’s wondrous beauty, and renews the importance of how it should be protected, especially from man him- self. - Candace diCarlo
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Damir Porobic, Untitled (Casco Flag from Memory) 1/10, 2014, Pigment print, 28 x 37inches, $1150
Born in the city of Mostar in Former Yugoslavia (presently Bosnia and Herzegovina), Porobic moved to the United States at the age of seventeen, and upon graduating High School received a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, MO, and a Masters of Fine Arts from West Virginia University in Morgantown, WV, where he majored in traditional and contemporary printmaking practice, and the alternative new media approaches to fine art making.
Damir Porobic is a master print maker and teaches at USM. He's a photographer too, but his meditation on the printing process and how the form supports the content of the work is what's so fascinating. The image we're sharing in was made in 2014 and he said recently, "I'm not in a hurry to part with this." He’s thinking decades and history. Time, memory, meditation, WORK (chop wood- carry water) , a haunting, and suffering are what's at stake here. This work represents an ongoing body of work that conveys his life experiences as a Bosnian American. It's what he's coming to terms with and what defines his identity. (His boat's name is Fugee which means refugee in his native language.) This image takes two weeks to print- by hand, constantly printing. He’s using an inkjet print as though it’s off set. It's a registry of a few dots from an inkjet printer laid over and over and over until the registration makes an image that is almost a ghost of the original form. It looks a bit like a pointillist painting in the end but softer with evidence of the labor it took to get there. The process is repeated again and again. It reminds me of another printmaker friend, Greg Shattenberg who has been tap dancing for 30 years on the side (of printmaking). We talk about registry or the sound that his shoes make- the repetition, the pace and beat of the dance. We're really talking about timpani and exertion. Damir Porobic might also be a percussionist whose newly digital sounds comes from the past. His work is precise and random at the same time and somehow the complexity of the process gets at the essence of the subject- is it the democracy that the globe wants? Can we offer it?
Print Offerings/ Fundraising to benefit MMPA
These pieces were donated by the artists who made them and 100% of the purchase goes toward our operating expenses. Thank you to Artists Barbara Peacock and Christine Higgins for their generosity.
Barbara Peacock, Bubble Gum & Cigarettes, from Hometown book, 1/25, ink jet print, 22 x 17 inches. $750.
Hometown is not only about Westford, the town where she grew up and which she called home for over thirty years, but it is also about where she took up photography and took her images. In this book, divided into two sections, she takes us along the path of her life. We start this soulful journey with the early square images that have the subdued color palette of the ’80s medium format film. Although she keeps her distance, it’s clear that she belongs. The images are imbued with poetry. They are delicate, and they show, with a certain nostalgia, an era gone by, a way of life of a small community with all its rituals and celebrations.
Barbara Peacock is an American photographer, living in Portland, Maine. She has published the books Hometown (2016) and American Bedroom (2023)Peacock grew up in Westford, Massachusetts. She studied fine arts at Boston University College of Fine Arts, and photography and filmmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, also in Boston. Hometown is a 33-year project that documents the small-town people and events of Westford.
Christine Higgins, Falling, 3/6, 2023, Oil ink on Hahnemuhle, 26.75 x 20 inches. $500
Color, pattern, light, and movement are found in my work. I am drawn to contrast and juxtaposition – the presence of fragility and strength. Water wearing down the hardness of rock, moss clinging to untenable surfaces, the abandoned and forgotten, growth despite adversity. Present are layered elements of time in what has come before, vestigial traces of history portraying past evidence in the present. I look to the sublime in the sometimes over-looked ordinary. CH
Christine Johnson Higgins works in her woodland studio in Readfield Maine. She earned her B.A. in art from Marietta College, Ohio, and M.Ed. in Integrated Arts from Lesley University, Cambridge, Mass. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Northeast, Ohio, Ecuador and Finland, and she has been featured in various publications. Seasonally, she explores pulp painting and other fiber techniques during the summer, while taking photographs and translating them into photogravure prints year round.
