BLUE HILL — Be Still for a Moment, co-curated by Cynthia Winings and Avy Claire at Cynthia Winings Gallery, 24 Parker Point Road, June 25 to July 30. Opening reception, Sunday, June 30 5-7 p.m.
Cynthia Winings Gallery is presenting its first co-curated exhibition, bringing new artists and fresh ideas to the gallery. This year she has asked Avy Claire, one of her stable artists to join her on this journey. The exhibit titled “Be Still for a Moment” invites three new artists, Jonathan Mess, Ian Trask, and Stuart Shils to join CWG regulars Lari Washburn and Avy Claire in an exhibit that asks the audience to allow the unexpected enter.
CURATOR’S STATEMENT
Much of the conversation surrounding this exhibit has been about the experience that lives between the studio and the walls of the gallery. This experience exists for the artist, as well as the viewer. It has also become the wonderful journey in the curation of this show.
In our visits with the artists leading up to this exhibit the conversations tend to be fleeting. Words float out into space and are held up for a moment of further elaboration. We connect. And we are left with the experience of having an unexpected exchange. A rewarding exchange that explodes into delight. The words are gone — the works of art are what remain.
The works we chose come from an intuitive process and internal investigation and reflect the artists’ journeys. Each of these artists allow the unexpected to enter. It is a critical maneuvering of material to become something that transcends itself and speaks to something greater. It is a willingness to go into the unknown, inviting chance. It is an uncompromising, rigorous trust in one’s critical eye, a playfulness, a freedom. In their studios, each artist stirs process and gesture into an alchemical moment that creates the object with which we, as viewers can be still.
– Avy Claire and Cynthia Winings
Stuart Shils lives and teaches in Philadelphia and has been exhibiting primarily in NYC for the past 40+ years in addition to many exhibits around the country and abroad. He explores the interplay of the observed world and imbues his works with a sense of timelessness and raw beauty.. He explains, “I work in the studio with an eye turned perhaps more inward than out, mulling over a lifetime layering of accumulated observation, memory and desire.”
In addition to teaching visual arts with a focus on ceramics in midcoast Maine, Jonathan Mess has shown extensively in Maine at Corey Daniels Gallery, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Cove Street Arts to name a few, as well as many exhibits nationally. He builds his ceramic sculptures by pressing clay bodies together and leaving open the full spectrum of possibility. He is attuned to an awareness of balance, harmony, and tension in the final form while allowing for the unknown. He writes, “My artwork is characterized by experimental abstraction using reclaimed ceramic materials and referencing natural land forms, constantly pushing my materials and processes into new territory.”
Ian Trask is a sculptor and installation artist who moved to Maine in 2015 from New York City where he was a core member of the Invisible Dog Art Center community and exhibited widely. His work continues to be featured in Maine with shows including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Danforth Gallery, Cove Street Arts. A sense of play and experimentation guides his studio practice demonstrating the value he finds in our human evidence —often found trash — that he has turned into the materials of planets and cellular structures. They are the mysteries of life condensed into floating textural marvels. He writes,“by provoking the impulse to explore, each piece rouses in the beholder the same spirit of curiosity, experimentation and play that occasioned their creation.”
Lari Washburn has lived and worked in Maine for more than 20 years and is represented by Clark Gallery in Lincoln, Massachusetts along with the Cynthia Winings Gallery. Inspired by walks around her home in Wiscasset, her daily sketchbook practice is a record of nature which she uses to explore the myriad possibilities in line, shape and texture. Washburn believes in the viewer to have room to make their own meaning, which for her seems like a natural completion of the process of making. She explained that ”developing access to my inner voice and learning to trust what I felt” taught her what she knows.
Avy Claire has lived on and off in Maine since the early 1970s. In addition to shows around the country, she has shown at the Portland Museum, Cove Street Arts and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art among others in Maine where a variety of expressions, including installations and video have been seen. Her paintings are rhythmic layers of mark making and color, a physical process mimicking the energy and dynamics found in nature. Claire explains, “My time in the studio is a process of reaching. I search through layers of gesture with a goal of landing somewhere I haven’t yet been. It is experimental and experiential.”
Abstract art gives its audience an interior mirror, a portal towards something revealed. In its form and pattern and color, we might recognize a source, such as the geological strata of Jonathan Mess’ ceramic pillars or a map of stars in Lari Washburn’s painting. Their brilliance does not rely on these familiarities however; they go much further in reminding us about taking chances, allowing the unexpected to enter, and being true to one’s vision.
