Decoding the Domestic

June 16 - August 5

Opening Reception Friday, June 16, 5-7pm

Artist Talk: July 14, 5-8pm

We are proud to announce our current exhibition as it kicks off our “gallery season”. The photographic work in this exhibition focuses on how an artist’s surroundings can affect and inspire the work. The images leap ahead, embracing the avant-garde, while nodding backwards at the art historical themes of still life, interiors, landscape and studio work. It reminds us that our thoughts about homely things will always be important to communicate too. As ever there will be framed photographs and prints in the exhibit.  The works are beautiful, explore contemporary theory, new technologies, media and they shouldn’t be missed. - Director, Denise Froehlich

Lauren Semivan

A Map Both Distant and Concrete

Within photographs there exists a converging of two scales; the physical world - things in themselves as they are - and the interior world lying hidden in all things; a synchronism of the eternal and the everyday. My ongoing body of work has evolved through intense contemplative study and manipulation of an ephemeral sculptural environment which is photographed with a large format 8x10” camera from the early 20th century. References to the physical world are skewed by our own perceptions and associations. Color is an emotional descriptor, creating depth within a two-dimensional space. The marks on the surface suggest topographies; roads, rivers, passageways, or impressions from suggested movement; scratches on glass, stains. Compositions evolve, are photographed, and then devolve into the next image. Materials and objects photographed are discarded, secondary to the image itself. – Lauren Semivan

Prints available to purchase.

Lynn Karlin

Still Life will forever exist as a genre for photographers, always evolving in different and new forms, as it has since classical antiquity and the Middle Ages. For me these vegetables evoke through beauty that is also sustenance, a sense of connectiveness to our own self-image and self-esteem. The Chinese cabbage with its purple, aged leaves draped over a pedestal, the radicchio disrobing and the sensuous pear all remind us that beauty is ephemeral, beauty has many layers and beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. – Lynn Karlin.

Prints available to purchase.

Caroline Savage

 I construct these photographs as site-specific investigations of our fleeting natural reality, the Maine forests, exploring the relationship between the camera lens, light, space and time, making the process of capturing an image frozen into a moment of color. I confront the present moment by walking with the camera, gliding in panorama mode to extend, alter it so the movement is visible as a layered, volatile, sweeping encounter.

– Caroline E. Savage

Jessica Burko

The work in the Fractured & Found series makes connections between interior being and being on display, creating emotional divisiveness while in demand by conflicting forces. Searching for balance between selfhood, motherhood, working, and rest, feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by compartmentalizing and forcing a fit into each role. Through the juxtaposition of isolated compartments of broken moments and emptiness there appears to be room for breath, for rest, or perhaps they are intervals yet to be filled. The absence of image hints further at a disjointed existence. Incorporating found materials helps me feel grounded in what’s real and what exists outside of my head. The drawers symbolize not just boxes I’m trying to fit into, but also spaces that were once private, now revealed and put on display. Much of my work grows out of the battle between yearning for one thing but doing another. Embedding the images into encaustic is like sealing time in a bottle, making it quiet and still, like secrets hidden beneath folded cotton.

– Jessica Burko

Joyce Tenneson

Radiant Beings: The Magical Essence of Flowers
Joyce Tenneson’s new series,” Radiant Beings,” is her return, during the lockdown resulting from quarantine, to the world of plants and flowers. This time, her approach to this subject is decidedly different than her past work on nature. Her new photographs are brought to life against a deep blue background. The color blue becomes, for Tenneson, a symbol of harmony and peace, encompassing the hues of the sky and the oceans. It also is a healing color that restores us in difficult times. Many of her new pictures are monochromatic, with the flowers being converted to a diaphanous white. They appear almost as x-rays, in which we look behind their fragile exteriors. The flowers and flora become elemental forms that are often blurred by movement, as Tenneson manipulates them while the lens is open. Rather than photographing with a tight, sharp focus, she intentionally blurs the picture. She has also used a very narrow depth of field that causes the backgrounds to appear soft and billowy. Her interest is in flowers or pods as animated forms. She often layers them and lets them cascade unpredictably. There is a range, in this series, between the tight and loose organization of the elements. Many photographs feel improvisational, and if she uses color, it is one or two colors – used for effect. Often the brighter colors blur, and the flowers become partially abstract. – Holden Luntz

“Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers
Plucked in the garden, all the summer through
And winter, and it seemed as if they grew
In this close room, nor missed the sun and showers.
So, in the like name of that love of ours,
Take back these thoughts which here unfolded too,
And which on warm and cold days I withdrew
From my heart’s ground. Indeed, those beds and bowers
Be overgrown with bitter weeds and rue,
And wait thy weeding; yet here’s eglantine,
Here’s ivy!—take them, as I used to do
Thy flowers, and keep them where they shall not pine.
Instruct thine eyes to keep their colors true,
And tell thy soul their roots are left in mine.” 

– Sonnet 44

View Radiant Beings portfolio in store.

Andrew O’Brien

My current photographic work is centered on domestic interiors; these are often subjectless digital images which I carefully edit using non-destructive techniques to (perhaps) thoroughly destructive ends.  This series arises from consideration of certain moments (frames) within the domestic environment.  There is an attention to the solitude and tranquility of these spaces while also maintaining the fragility of light and line.   It is hard to separate content from process.  I work directly from raw files and perform all my edits in Lightroom.  There is an inherent plasticity to digital media that allows me to stretch and bend existing light conditions through various modifiers until I arrive at a place of color and abstraction that the emphasizes the compositional elements.  I am particularly interested in how color and line can affect the balance, depth and scale of composition.  

– Andrew O’Brien

Prints available here.

Paul Rider

The cacophony of plastic that exists in our world is what is being explored through the imagery. The images are created similar to the process created by William Henry Fox Talbot with his photogenic drawings in The Pencil of Nature. While Talbot was using natural elements to create his imagery, these images are using the man made material of plastic. With Talbot’s process, the images were an artistic document of an ephemeral object. These images are slightly the reverse, an artistic creation utilizing objects that will outlive us, and most likely the imagery itself.

– Paul Rider

Prints available here.

Carol Eisenberg

Recently a visitor brought me a bouquet of flowers mixed with eucalyptus leaves.   The flowers soon began to decay but the eucalyptus leaves remained intact … all silvery, blue, and green depending on the light.  I photographed them against the bronze tiles of my kitchen backsplash and the effect was magical.  I added berries and flowers … some drawn, some photographed ... and tinkered with the colors.  The resulting images conjure a mythic, idyllic place where the ethereal beauties of the natural and made worlds co-exist in harmony.
– Carol Eisenberg

Gail Skudera

From a single photograph, multiple images can emerge to portray strength, fragility, beauty, demise and love in a single moment. I deconstruct and reassemble photographic prints with other materials to allow for new imagery to develop, and I am passionate about the subjects that I work with. Subjects range from photographs of noted artists and writers, found album photos, and family portraits. Ambiguity and familial bond make the work all the more intriguing to me. I have worked with particular subjects repeatedly over time and they compel me to make more works in a similar vein. I work with materials that have history and relevance to everyday life, such as buttons, remnants from salvaged clothing, beads, colored thread and metal hardware. Imagery, pattern and structure are fused with handmade and contemporary studio practices to tell stories about the power of connection and our endurance when all seems to be lost.

– Gail Skudera

Prints available in store.

Claire Seidl

My painter’s eye directs me in shooting, developing, and printing the photographs. Elements intrinsic to painting, like gestural line, multiple layered space, and ambiguous form and content, are all present. Some people see my photographs as abstractions, but they are deeply rooted in the real world; they are filled with specifics of place and people and natural phenomena - and their ephemeral nature. My approach to realism is subsumed by the camera itself, which reveals what we can’t see - in the dark, for example - or what is lost when we shift our gaze.  Many of my photographs are taken at night when our ability to see clearly is limited but the open gaze of the camera dispassionately records everything. All of my photographs suggest a human presence, with or without figures in them. At times, the images feel like a flash of memory, a moment held. I am very interested in how we see (or don’t see) what is right in front of us. The camera gathers more visual information, especially over time or in the dark, than our eyes can. It can hold multiple layers of space and reflections in focus while we can only perceive one at a time. My photographs show more than the unassisted eye can see. They are not manipulated in the darkroom.

– Claire Seidl

Deb Whitney

The Better Angels…

Art critic John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing, “You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand, and you called the painting Vanity, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.” And Laura Mulvey stated in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, “The male gaze is the way in which the visual arts and literature depict the world and women from a masculine point of view, presenting women as objects of male pleasure.”

Developing the concept of the male gaze, Berger and Mulvey both provided an idea to describe the alleged power that men have over women. The women of burlesque maintain that the power is theirs, that by choosing the stage they defied social and gender norms to assert themselves and their bodies. Certainly, this sexualized and objectified construct of women in men’s eyes is outside of the home where it would be the “other” women, not the idealized, virtuous, home makers providing comfort in all forms. The Madonna-Whore dichotomy, as Freud defined it, where men perceive women's nurturance and sexuality as mutually exclusive, today feels like an antiquated notion.

By combining imagery of burlesque and film stills, stitching as drawing on vintage handkerchiefs, I am flipping the notion of female identity – a female gaze. With the act of combining the satire of Victorian burlesque with the bawdiness of American burlesque, the treatment of this imagery on the hankies brings these girlies in to the home where they are the queens of their own realms.

– Deb Whitney

The social changes set in motion by the Civil War also began to erode the cultural hegemony of the domestic feminine ideal, the so-called angel in the house. Young women began to think of themselves as unique individuals rather than "true women," initiating the decades-long movement toward the independent "new woman," who would become a major cultural phenomenon at the turn of the twentieth century.

–"Domestic and Sentimental Fiction ." American History Through Literature 1870-1920. 

To borrow from Abraham Lincoln, these are the better angels.

Candace diCarlo

Prints available in store.

Candace diCarlo, Quelques Photos de la Salle d’Attente (Photographs from the Waiting Room) 2013-2017, Inkjet print, 18 x 12 each, price

There is often a science and logic to the imagined.  In this photographic series I work discarded paper into abstract tableaux, often to explore the mysterious spectrum between illusion and reality.  The images are also a continuation of my experiments with the sculptural aspects of paper.  My curiosity for the medium relates not only to its adaptability and translucent beauty, but also from a sort of reverence.  Despite its ephemeral and quotidian nature, it has been the medium on which the history of man’s ideas and beliefs has been recorded.  

The series title, Quelques Photos de la Salle d’Attente (Photographs from the Waiting Room), was conceived during an extended period of ill health, during which I created the images as an exercise to deal.  However my title has broader metaphoric application to the creative process and to life in general.  Waiting alone is a mode beyond listening.  Its silence creates of us an empty vessel for the unknown to enter and for mystery and gnosis to unfold.  The attendant feeling is archetypal and powerful, its resonance serves as the foundation and catalyst for my work.  The series title also references a passage in John Fowle’s ‘The Magus,’ when the protagonist discovers a sign while hiking in the woods that directs him to a ‘salle d’attente’ — thus initiating a surreal adventure of discovery.

– Candace diCarlo

Sara Stites

My work has always had an organic, visceral aspect which I consider to be part of my concern with life issues, like vulnerability, passion, and the uncanny. Much of my work explores the paradoxical; sensitivity to deeply guarded inner stories coexists with a satiric playfulness, exploring the pathetic and comic.

– Sara Stites

Prints available in store.