"The exhibition “6/6/6” is a concept show in which six artists from six cities connected with each other through social networking media. Each artist selected another artist from a different city and so, through chain-letter logic, the direction was expansively unpredictable."
“New Paintings” from Hannah Barnes, open from July 1st to July 28th
Opening Reception First Friday July 1st 6-10pm.
The work in this show has in no small way been influenced by the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges. I particularly looked to his ideas about time and his use of narrative structures as metaphors for meaning and experience. I found his use of mirrors, symmetry, simultaneity and circularity, labyrinths, and chance operations to be themes that applied directly to my own painting ideas.
“Eyes of Borges” is based on an enlarged digital reproduction of an actual contour drawing made by Borges. The drawing is a self-portrait Borges created later in his life when he had lost his sight – literally, a blind contour drawing. I selected the portion of the image I imagined to represent his eyes. When my digital reproduction was enlarged in Photoshop, it became a broken, pixilated mass of lines and squares. I loved the idea of this drawing seen from a great distance – as a bad pixilated reproduction. I also love that the initial drawing was created from Borges’ memory of his face, from a place of blindness.
Artist Bio
Hannah Barnes was born in Bridgewater, Massachusetts and currently lives and works in Muncie Indiana. Barnes received her BFA in Painting from Maine College of Art and her MFA in VisualArt from Rutgers State University of New Jersey. Her work has been exhibited in galleries nationally including Work Gallery and Hogar Collection in Brooklyn NY, the Ohio State University in Columbus OH, Hay Gallery in Portland ME, Hello Gallery in New Haven CT, Arthouse Contemporary in Austin TX, and the Shore institute for Contemporary Art in Long Branch, NJ. Barnes has been a visiting artist and lecturer at Ohio State University, Kent State University, and Maine College of Art and is currently assistant professor of painting at ball state university.
Barnes’s work draws on traditional media and painterly craft to explore themes of ambiguity, fragmentation, and the rejection of overt meaning in painting. This exhibition presents new oil paintings, works on paper, and a large site-specific wall painting.
Iain Kerr: THINGS: PROPOSITIONS/EXAPTATIONS
Iain Kerr is an internationally recognized artist and writer whose work has been widely exhibited including exhibitions with The Whitney Museum of American Art, Mass MoCA and Grand Arts, Kansas City, MO. Kerr lives and works in Montclair, New Jersey and holds teaching appointments at Montclair State University, The University of Maine andBates College.
While Iain Kerr is best known in his active role in spurse – a peripatetic collective and experimental consultation service – his own unique body of work has rarely been presented, until now. Kerr’s Things: Propositions/Exaptations is a trenchant critique of the western tradition’s fundamental misunderstanding of “Things,” and a sweeping set of alternative propositions.Things: Propositions/Exaptations conceives of the gallery space as an extended experimental form of diagrammatic essay and philosophical argument. It moves beyond the medium of writing to more of an embodied form of dialog, with some of the thinkers that have been central to Kerr’s work over the years: Simondon, Whitehead, Thompson, Deleuze and Stengers. As an experiment beyond our current paradigm of “thingness,” the dynamics of space, diagrams and the reader are entangled to produce a new aesthetic consideration of things as active entangled material propositions.
“THINGS: PROPOSITIONS/EXAPTATIONS” is open from May 6 through May 29.
Opening Reception First Friday May 6th 6-10pm.
Artist Bio
Iain Kerr is an artist, writer, and teacher whose engagements have taken him into and across the fields of philosophy, emergent architectures, evolutionary ecology, developmental systems theory, clothing design, labor practices, and foodways, amongst other things. He is a founding member of the international trans-disciplinary collectivespurse and the corporation: That Word Which Means Smuggling Across Borders, Incorporated (2004-2009).
His individually and collaborative work has been hosted by various institutions in the US (such as the Whitney, Grand Arts, CAFK+A, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Mass MoCA), as well as internationally (Poland, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Italy, Nunavut, and the Netherlands), and published in a number of books and journals including: The Interventionists, The Object of Labor, Experimental Geography, The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Surface, ID, NY Times, Elle, Teme Celeste, Art Papers, Monitor, Interior Design, Art Journal, and Western Front.
In addition to working as part of spurse he has collaborated with the artists: Petia Morozov, Leon Johnson, William Pope L., Mark Dion, Cesare Pietriosti, Allison Knowles, J. Morgan Puett, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, and Bartow+Metzgar; lectured and taught widely (including Harvard University, Columbia University, Parsons, University of Maine, CCA, RISDI and the University of Venice). He current writing has focused on the Philosophy of Things, Systems Theory, Trans-species Foodways and experimental pedagogic practices.
About Gallery 37-A
Gallery 37-A is a project space initiated in December of 2009 by Brook Delorme and Daniel Pepice. Presenting exhibitions of the work of emerging and established artists, Gallery 37-A is located at 37A Wharf Street in Portland, Maine’s Old Port District. Gallery 37-A is open to the public Thursday – Monday 12 – 6pm and by appointment.
For Further Information, Please contact
Brook DeLorme, brookdel@yahoo.com
Daniel Pepice, danieljohnpepice@gmail.com
"Confronting and denying conventional aesthetics and modes of exhibition, Iain Kerr: artist, writer, educator, and founding member of spurse, an international peripatetic collective and experimental consultation service, intimately reinvents the project space at Gallery 37-A. The artist presents a series of two-dimensional diagrams and abstracted meditations on his cross-disciplinary proposal for a reconsideration of being. Ingesting and re-contextualizing the arguments of thinkers such as Heidegger, Whitehead, Deleuze, Debord, and Michael Pollan, Kerr intertwines art and science to provide an alternative approach to Western philosophy."
— Review: Iain Kerr examines truth, reality, and the human way - Museum And Gallery
