Chelsea Ellis and Todd Watts
August 11 - September 30, 2023
Opening Reception: Friday, August 11, 5-8pm, Also featuring: ry’s Jazz trio and a wine collaboration with grippy tannins
Artist Talks: August 25, 5-8pm, Todd Watts
September 8, 5-8pm, Chelsea Ellis
Join us for a very philosophical exhibition that asks questions and makes us ponder who we are and where we’re headed while incorporating new methods of representation and reflection. The work is thoughtful, beautiful and extremely well crafted. If you want to know where photography is headed, pop in and take a look.
– Denise Froehlich Dir. MMPA
ARTSCOPE REVIEW: https://artscopemagazine.com/2023/08/hell-bent-to-kick-the-edges-chelsea-ellis-and-todd-watts-at-mmpa-portland/
Todd Watts
I make photographs. It is said that a photograph captures a moment in time, an event perhaps. That may be, but the source of this notion originates from the mechanical manifestations of cameras, lenses, and film. People do not capture moments of time. How would we do that? Our personal experience of time is fluid. The events in our lives do not hold still.
My pictures do not capture moments. They are photographs, but they do not depict particular events. Grace Hartigan put it this way, “One of the most difficult things of all, is not to have the painting be a depiction of the event but the event itself.” Her words are a well known mantra of contemporary art. But we don’t need to know the histories surrounding a picture to add it to our personal history. In every way, art and life are inseparable. At the beginning of each day, I can speculate but cannot know what will happen. An unexpected conversation may completely alter my assumptions or the lack of an ingredient may impact my dinner plans. It is the same when I make art.
When I make my pictures I speak to them, often out loud, and they whisper back. The work is completed when, as in any conversation, the subject changes. The conversation remains encapsulated only in the work, to be continued by myself or by anyone else. After lunch, perhaps, or during a long flight to Paris, or right now.
– Todd Watts
Watts has created wide-ranging, often large-scale, color photographs using both traditional and digital technologies. During the last forty years, these works have been shown in over twenty five one-person shows and in many more group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and in Europe. His work is represented in major museum collections—including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale Art Gallery, Albertina and Musee St. Pierre and in significant private collections.
The Blanchard Weather Report 7-13-2015
Blanchard Weather Report is a discrete set of photographs within Todd Watts’s extensive life’s work. "The Blanchard Weather Report began as a visual report sent to friends who asked. A visual conversation. A wordless documentary discourse carried on over the internet. In those first pictures, there were objects – trees, and rocks, and streams, and grass – but the weather was the subject. On a particularly windy day, failing to keep my footing and wondering if that loud sound was my rib cracking – it was the screen on my phone – I began to think of the weather as an object, equal to the flowers, and to the mountains, and to the lakes, no less solid than a taxi careening towards a jay walker on Herald Square. Weather is affecting and I felt affected. I blame the weather for my damaged phone, and also for umbrellas that collapse, and for galoshes. But the weather also provides color and line, mass and movement, time and history – and these are building blocks of visual art. Add to these, the recent political wrangling, economic turmoil, social unrest, and general uncertainty surrounding the weather, and you have all of the elements this artist requires to work."
– from the Introduction by Todd Watts of the monograph that accompanies this portfolio.
“Baby, it's cold outside,” I know that song and hear it played on the radio each winter. I heard an exemplary rendition this past holiday season, performed by Willie Nelson and Norah Jones. The refrain was written by Frank Loesser in 1944, but I find it easy to imagine that they were the first words spoken by Adam to Eve, or she to he. Today, I counted how many times I mentioned the weather to my wife and she to me – twelve. The last thing she said as she slipped into sleep was, “Did you hear the weather report for tomorrow?” When I first meet someone and am unsure of what to say, I mention the weather. So do they. It is a safe bet that whatever weather opinion each holds, the conversation won't escalate to fisticuffs. Farmers I have met are never happy about the weather. It is either too cold or too hot or too wet or too dry. Never just right. Picnic goers, and skiers, and airplane pilots, and builders, and shoppers, and moms, dads, and little kids will all have their say. Weather is the context within which romances are born and murders are committed. The weather has influenced all our actions and everything else. I am not saying anything new here, but there is something new. Until recently, the weather has been, for the most part, anonymously consequential. The elephant that came to every picnic along with the ants. An unconscious unpredictable entity that we love when it suits us and hate when it gets in the way. It wasn't the asteroid but the resulting weather that brought on the Paleocene. Now, it is argued, we find ourselves in the Anthropocene. We arrived here on a wave of unconsidered action and we have done the impossible. We have altered the weather.
The Blanchard Weather Report began as a visual report sent to friends who asked. A visual conversation. A wordless documentary discourse carried on over the internet. In those first pictures, there were objects – trees, and rocks, and streams, and grass – but the weather was the subject. On a particularly windy day, failing to keep my footing and wondering if that loud sound was my rib cracking – it was the screen on my phone – I began to think of the weather as an object. Equal to the flowers, and to the mountains, and to the lakes. No less solid than a taxi careening towards a jay walker on Herald Square. Weather is affecting and I felt affected. I blame the weather for my damaged phone and also for umbrellas that collapse and for galoshes. But the weather also provides color and line, mass and movement, time and history – and these are building blocks of visual art. Add to these, the recent political wrangling, economic turmoil, social unrest, and general uncertainty surrounding the weather, and you have all of the elements this artist requires to work.
The Blanchard Weather Report started as document; but it took a left turn. The natural relationship of the parts came undone, as happens in art, all of the elements demanding their place but not in any particular order. Color and line, mass and movement, are present but not bound by time and history. Time begins when we see the picture, and history follows. Time is the picture, history is the viewer. Artworks are new to nature, and in the Blanchard Weather Report I am adopting nature. There are no people in these pictures. There is no need because their presence is implied. In art, our presence is always implied. As we look at pictures, we become complicit in their making, as we are in every artwork ever made.
– Todd Watts
“Isn't this a lovely day to be caught in the rain? You were going on your way, now you've got to remain”.
– Irving Berlin, 1935.
Todd Watts, Blanchard Weather Report, 2015, Monograph, 11.5 x 11.5 inches, $40.00
Todd Watts, A portfolio of six prints created in 2008, 23 x 19 inches, edition of 10, $9000 or $1,900 each
TODD WATTS
PORTFOLIO: Foiled farm - copse caper
Todd Watts, A portfolio of six prints created in 2006, 27 x 27 inches, edition of 25, $9000, Published by Multi-Editions Press
Chelsea Ellis
In my photographic work, I use my body and paint to create composite portraits of humanoid forms that blur the boundaries between the familiar and unfamiliar, investigating structures of the human body and posing the questions: Who are we? What are we?
– Chelsea Ellis
Chelsea Ellis In the studio at the Abbott Watts Residency, Monson Arts.
Chelsea Ellis (b. 1987, Maine) is a photographic artist who lives and works in Rockland, Maine. She earned her BA in Photography from the University of Southern Maine, Portland, ME in 2012. Ellis has exhibited in a number of group exhibitions in Maine, including Made Not Taken exhibition at the Gascoine Gallery in Monson (2022), No Time exhibition at Ticonic Gallery in Waterville (2022), A Possible Practice exhibition by A Clearing in Portland (2019), and Art2018 juried exhibition at Harlow Gallery in Hallowell (2018). She’s had a solo exhibition within the contemporary art series “Process” by AMPL Art Consulting in Portland, ME (2019). Ellis has had her work published in the community art publications Detritus and A Possible Practice.
