FARMINGTON — The Emery Community Arts Center is proud to present “Re-Imagined Topographies,” a community engaged art project that has the power to connect people through the arts. The exhibit is in the Emery Flex Gallery on the University of Maine at Farmington campus from Friday, Nov.15 to Saturday, Dec. 14. An opening reception will be held Friday, Nov. 15, 5-7 p.m., with remarks by the curators at 5:30 p.m.
Curated by Joshua DeMello and Lolly Phoenix, this community-based art project engages stories of resilience and encourages participating collaborators to reimagine life from a place of destruction. With more than 100 individual works included in the show, the exhibition presents the power of creativity through the aesthetic voices of the friends, strangers, neighbors, colleagues, peers, and children of our local community.
The project author and artist Joshua DeMello began by producing hundreds of individual pieces of art using reclaimed and repurposed waste paper and digital toner/inks that were intended for the trash. Each piece was made with a process that can only be described as random, chaotic, and slightly dangerous. The result resembles the ominous, yet beautiful, aesthetic of something destroyed, or perhaps, the starting point of creation itself.
Each piece is not a blank slate but rather a suspended moment captured after a catastrophic event just waiting to be made whole again. DeMello then invited community members to take one of these pieces and become an artist-collaborator by using it as a starting point for a new artwork. He welcomed participants to use any media or format and encouraged them to imagine it as something destroyed and then reimagine the “life” back into it.
The Re-Imagined Topographies Project was initiated 2013-14 in Farmington through a grant-funded Pop-up Gallery and then in 2014 at the New Portland Public Library, and again at Goddard College, Vermont in 2015. Work from the first three shows was made into a book “Re-Imagined Topographies”, published in 2014. This 2024 edition of the project comes eleven years after the first showing in Farmington as a new collaboration with the Emery Community Arts Center at UMF and the local community.
The Re-Imagined Topographies Project culminates as an art show for and by the local community. This project is an outlet for creativity but also an experience connected to the other participants in the community. Each participant doesn’t know what others have made until the opening of the exhibition, but everyone is collectively working with the same concept. Each piece is like a personal story, each work of art is truly unique. Community engaged arts have the power to connect people through a personal aesthetic voice and become the catalyst for a meaningful community experience displaying how our community values the arts.
DeMello is a multidisciplinary artist and teacher who lives and works in the Farmington area. He has been working in the studio arts since the late 1990s and received his BA in the arts with a focus on installation and new media arts from UMF in 2011. He then received his MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Goddard College in 2015. As a multidisciplinary artist DeMello’s work shifts between the studio, the handmade object, conceptual examination of space and place, to the socially merging field of the arts as community.
The Emery Arts Center gallery is located on Academy Street (between Main and High Street) in downtown Farmington. The gallery is open Monday to Friday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturday 4-6 p.m. Closed Sundays and holidays. For more information contact Ann Bartges, director of UMF Emery Community Arts Center, at [email protected] or 207-778-7461.
