Experimentation and connectivity are the foundation of Jackie Brown’s artistic process. The Maine artist works with malleable materials like clay, plaster, foam, and concrete to create immersive experiences that express her ideas about nature, science, and the interconnection of living systems. Her colorful organic sculptures are part of Materiality: The Matter of Matter, an exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) through February 11, 2018. “Each artist (in the exhibit) engages matter in different ways and examines the relationship between materials,” Brown says. “That’s a huge part of what I do.”

Brown plays with structure, a concept reflected in the synthesis of her work. Her sculptures are imagined biological systems. “I generate a lot of parts that I combine in to larger forms,” she says. “I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of sculpture and 3D. It helps me look at what’s under the surface of things.”

The connections between various living systems have fascinated Brown since she was an undergraduate at Hamilton College, taking classes in biology, philosophy and psychology. “That was the beginning,” she says. “I made connections between different subjects I studied and I really got involved with process and material.” At first she worked on images of the human figure; her art evolved after she discovered the work of neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks, noted for his writing and research about the human brain. “I was really excited about his work,” she says.

Jackie Brown in Mutated Growth installation

Sacks’ writings inspired Brown’s preternatural “Brain Fruit” series, created using, among other materials, plaster molds of wrinkled Osage oranges (the series is part of the installation by Brown in the Materiality exhibition, each with their own visual language but all ultimately united conceptually). The forms are both grotesque and playful. “I was interested in creating something that was otherworldly but also imaginative and playful,” Brown says. “The colors counterbalance the grotesque qualities. It makes you think: is this a healthy growth? Harmful? Benign or ambiguous?”

Brain Fruit

Brown is also an educator. Three years ago, she joined the art faculty at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, as an assistant art professor. She’s on sabbatical this year, combining extended studio time with residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Montana and at Emmanuel College in Boston. Her new work – “It’s so new I don’t really have a handle on it yet,” she says – is influenced by Maine. “My work is really shifting because of the landscape here and my interest in human interaction with living systems.” She trusts her materials and process to shape the final result.

Jackie Brown, artist
Brunswick, Maine
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Top image: Part of the Mutated Growth series. Photos courtesy of Jackie Brown

The post Playfully Connected appeared first on Take Magazine.

“In the winter when all the trees are bare, you can see Canada from here,” says Anna Hepler as I stare out on a verdant canopy from the second story of her studio in Eastport, Maine. I can just make out the Atlantic shining through the leaves. Perched on a small island just south of the Canadian border, Eastport is the definition of remote. It’s here that one of Maine’s most acclaimed contemporary artists chose to make her home four years ago, seeking out the solitude and freedom that have fueled her creative activity ever since.

Perhaps best known for her massive inflatable sculptures made from recycled plastic that swell and crumple as if breathing, Hepler constructs pieces that are remarkably diverse yet cohesive. For decades, the same collections of imagery—crystalline lattice structures; biomorphic cellular forms; and concentric, tightly spiraling masses—have preoccupied her work in ceramics, crocheted wire, soft sculpture, collage, etching, and virtually any other medium pulled into her creative orbit.

Bloom, photo courtesy of Anna Hepler

I first meet Hepler at the door of her Eastport studio, left open to the midsummer sea breeze. A 45-year-old with close-cropped silver hair, she bristles with energy. She takes a moment to wash the grit from her hands as I survey her workspace: a two-story, concrete-floored building Hepler and her husband refurbished several months ago. She retained her first studio in town—a raw industrial building tucked behind the storefronts along the city’s sleepy waterfront—as a secondary space, the staging ground for her museum-scale installations.

Books and tools line the walls of her studio, which is charged with the energy of constant activity and fresh ideas. An in-process wire sculpture sits on the floor, a portion of a monumental work that fills an entire gallery as part of the 2015 Portland Museum of Art Biennial. A side room reveals a miniature ceramics studio, where she creates dense clay objects in addition to functional pottery when the mood strikes her. The lofted second floor features flat files and a small printing press—“my little bindery,” as she refers to it fondly. Prototypes and works in progress lay scattered across the various stations, ready to be revisited at a moment’s notice.

Double Hung from Blind Spot, photo courtesy of Anna Hepler

Despite the evidence of intense focus that suffuses Hepler’s workshop, to her it is a place of refuge. “I prefer to be here whenever I can,” she tells me. “I rebuilt this space very much with eyes off the street, not putting windows in the first floor, turning away and only giving myself a place to look out high overhead. It goes back to the small-town problem: you look out and think, ‘Oh, there goes Billy Boon; what are they doing over there?’ You know everybody, especially in the winter. Living here, the hardest thing is getting your head out from under all of that. I feel that I built the studio very consciously as a private, inward space.”

This sense of interiority is a defining characteristic of Hepler’s work. Her creative world is a private universe, a place where recurring shapes and images—her “elemental forms,” as she calls them—seem to evolve and curl into themselves in a state of continual reinvention. For years she has explored this family of forms and motifs, flattening, stretching, and reconfiguring them in the pursuit of some basic core truth.

In Blind Spot, her recent solo exhibition at the University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor, Hepler filled the gallery with a constellation of objects and images: large-scale woodblock prints and etchings, a selection of sculptures in wood, matte black ceramics, airy wire sculptures, stitched textiles, and crocheted plastic forms that, for all their difference of scale and media, seem to carry the same essential genetic makeup. Faint allusions to organic life, paired with an intense visual restraint, permeate everything she makes.

Prints and sculpture from Blind Spot exhibit at University of Maine Museum of Art, photo courtesy of Anna Hepler

The explosion of output found in Blind Spot began with a simple collage. Animal camouflage collected from an issue of National Geographic, cut and layered into biomorphic abstractions, led to abstract prints and sculptures that explore shimmering permutations of creaturely, enigmatic forms, all pattern and volume. The most fascinating work from the series is a sculpture made from wood panels—the original woodblocks from which the prints were made—hinged together into a three-dimensional object, hanging in space like a sort of surreal animal pelt.

Alphabet installation from BlindSpot exhibit at University of Maine Museum of Art, photo courtesy of Anna Hepler

Blind Spot revealed not only Hepler’s ingenuity across media, but also her prolific rate of output. “You can get a lot done here in the winter,” she says. “There’s not much else to do, as you can imagine.” Before her move to Eastport, Hepler was a professor of art at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, where she became a well-known and much-beloved fixture in Maine’s widely dispersed but tight-knit art community.

The decision to give up teaching and the promise of a stable career to devote herself more fully to her craft was difficult, but necessary. “I miss the relationships,” she says, “but I do not miss the teaching at all. Every time I’m put into that position, even as a visiting artist, I feel almost immediately awkward. It seems like such a false pretense for me to have knowledge and to be dispensing it, because the whole thing we do as creative people is try what is unfamiliar and take risks. So the notion of being an authority in your field—and professionalizing the output—I feel like it’s corrupting.”

Hepler is unapologetic about her intuitive approach to her work, and to art in general. Well spoken, incisive, and confident, she nonetheless looks at art making with an air of uncertainty, a kind of risk taking that simply wasn’t tenable within the humdrum of academia. “The institution asks you—needs you—to act with authority in relation to your students,” she says. “So all of the vulnerabilities that are so much the climate of making your best work are held at bay.”

It’s the search for that atmosphere of creative honesty that finally led Hepler and her family to settle in Eastport, following brief stints in places as farflung as California, Rome, Washington State, and South Korea. “When I was living in Korea, everything I made was hot pink,” she confesses with a laugh. “Things get more structural and black and white in New England. I don’t know what happens.” Her husband, Jon Calame, is a freelance nonfiction writer, and their two children, whom they homeschool, have been raised in an environment of flexibility and independence.

For Hepler and her family, the relative isolation of Eastport is both a blessing and a challenge. As we scan her personal library discussing influences, she hugs a favorite hardbound volume to her chest as a sort of thrilled shiver moves through her. “Thank god for publishing! You just can’t see stuff like this up here.” Trips to larger cities like Boston and New York provide a necessary injection of cultural inspiration and are planned months in advance. “My parents-in-law have a place in New York City, and we go there every year,” she says. “For those brief moments when we get into a big city, we’re all just so thirsty for it after being up here. We’re so fresh to any new experience. It’s exciting.”

These rare excursions help feed the long, quiet periods of activity on the island. “Leaving is an important part of being here,” she says. “We all need chances to escape wherever we are.” While the stability, calm, and near anonymity afforded by a life away from the center nourishes her creativity, Hepler is by no means a recluse. On the heels of her massive installation in the Portland biennial, she is planning solo shows in Virginia and Colorado, followed by a residency and an exhibition at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, the summer of 2016. The school made an indelible mark on art history in the 1970s as a remote but highly influential bastion for conceptual art. It’s that same spirit of seclusion and experimentation that Hepler hopes to tap into during her time there. In many ways, it’s what she first sought in coming north to Eastport.

“Moving up here was in large part a way to know myself, away from all my insecurities,” she says. “I’m the type of person to be concerned about what other people think. But if I can live up here and be alone, away from those voices, I have a better chance at listening to myself. That’s all we can do in our lives anyway, is listen to ourselves.

“We’re all alone with our work, and I think that the more honest we can be with ourselves, the better the quality of what we make. It’s all part of some larger project to answer the question: What would I make alone on a desert island? Not that that’s a realistic context.” She pauses for a moment, mulling over her own quandary. “But I am on an island,” she adds finally, smiling to herself. “I’m getting there.”

Anna Hepler–artist
Eastport, Maine
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Top image, Anna Hepler, photo by Allison Osberg

The post Artist at the Edge of the World appeared first on Take Magazine.

Take is going on the road, checking out New England’s corners for everything from the best bodegas to tiny galleries and music spots. We’ll be adding towns as we come across them. Check back regularly for the latest New England finds. First up? Brunswick, Maine, home to a lot more than Bowdoin College.

Settled in 1628, Brunswick was initially known by its Native American name, Pejepscot. Indeed, the town’s website, notes that Maine Street—yes, that’s with an “e” of course—was “laid out by the ‘Pejepscot Proprietors’ in 1717 at a width of 12 rods (198 feet) so that travelers between Fort Pejepscot on the Androscoggin River and Maquoit Bay would always be nearly 100 feet from the woods on each side, providing protection from ambush.”

Another historical tidbit? Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabinˆwhile living in Brunswick where her husband taught at Bowdoin. She apparently, or so the story goes, got a vision for the book while praying in First Parish Church, which still sits in the center of town.

Here are five finds in Brunswick, Maine for you to check out during your next visit.

Photo by Katie Bingham-Smith

Danny’s Hot Dog Stand

Locals and visitors alike know that Danny’s is the place to go if you’ve got a hankering for a hot dog. Danny’s has been selling hot dogs—steamed or grilled, you decide—since 1982. Allow a little extra time to grab lunch as the line, while speedly, is almost always long. You can grab a dog, chips, and a drink for around $5.
Location: On the town green, 171-181 Maine Street, Brunswick, Maine

Photo courtesy of Estilo

Estilo

Estilo is the kind of resale place where you just never know what you’ll find. One day, you could score a pair of Frye boots, another day a Coach bag or one-of-a-kind jewelry. Locals know about Estilo. Now you do, too. You’re welcome.
Location: 10 Pleasant Street, Brunswick, Maine

Photo courtesy of Wilbur’s of Maine Chocolate Confections

Wilbur’s of Maine Chocolate Confections

Wilbur’s Of Maine Chocolate Confection’s is a bit of a mouthful, which seems appropriate given that filling your mouth—and belly—with delectable chocolate wonderfulness is their raison d’etre. With a focus on all things local, the family-owned business’s panoply of chocolate offerings includes chocolate-covered blueberries as well as chocolate-covered caramel with Maine sea salt.
Location: 143 Maine Street, Brunswick, Maine

Photo courtesy of Kings and Queens Hair Studio

Kings and Queens Hair Studio

Kings and Queens is both a throwback to the barbershops of yesteryear and a hair studio with its finger on what’s coming in hairstyles. Need a straight razor shave? A classic fade with custom designs? Extensions? Kings and Queens can likely help you.
Location: 50 Maine Street, Brunswick, Maine

Photo by Katie Bingham-Smith

Wyler’s

Wyler’s may have started as a pottery shop, but it’s grown into eclectic store that offers everything from women’s clothing to hand-crafted jewelry from Maine artists, accessories and toys. It’s a great shop to browse; you’re sure to find a gift for a friend and go home with something for yourself.
Location: 150 Maine Street, Brunswick, Maine

Top image Wilbur’s of Maine Chocolate Confections

The post Five Finds in Brunswick, Maine appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our September 2015 print edition. 

Peter McLaughlin launched his music career in Portland, Maine, and never looked back.

McLaughlin’s work as a drummer, composer, sound engineer, producer, and collaborator makes him one of the highest-regarded champions of the city’s music scene. His new project—Pretty Purgatory, which launched late last year—is both an Americana and folk-focused record label and an art collective. The label has released new offerings by Family Planning; Butcher Boy; Lisa/Liza; and McLaughlin’s own band, The Milkman’s Union. The latest is a split 7″ single featuring Maine’s Jacob Augustine backed by the psych-folk band Bad Braids from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Peter McLaughlin at SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine.

“It’s easily my proudest release so far—from music, production value, right down to the art and packaging, designed collaboratively by Jakob Battick, Megan Biscieglia, and Tom Ryan,” McLaughlin says.

What is it about this coastal city, with a modest population of just over 66,000 and a reputation that rests more on chefs than musicians, that attracted the Needham, Massachusetts, native? It turns out that while Portland’s culinary diversity lures tourists, its cultural vibrancy has inspired an influx of savvy, dynamic, and creative music makers.

Upon his 2010 graduation from Bowdoin College, where he studied composition with celebrated American composer Elliott Schwartz, McLaughlin flirted with the idea of moving to a larger metropolitan area before turning his focus to Portland. “I was choosing between Boston, New York, Portland, and Northampton [Massachusetts]. I thought that the Portland music scene was honestly more interesting. It seemed to be a tight-knit community of people creating exciting music, and I wanted to be a part of it.”

On top of running his record label, McLaughlin also programs SPACE Gallery’s musical performances.

McLaughlin immersed himself in the scene by expanding on his college job experience as a soundman and talent booker for Bowdoin’s campus pub. He landed a gig at the busy nonprofit arts-and-music venue SPACE Gallery. Today he is the organization’s music programmer, bringing in such notable acts as Screaming Females, Death Vessel, and Today Is the Day. It’s a job that allows him the flexibility to continue touring as a musician.

“I’ve hit the road hard these last couple months, doing short tours and multi-week runs,” McLaughlin says. “I’ve traveled all over, and my travels always reaffirm what I know about Portland—that it’s a unique place. You get all the niceties of a small town with many of the advantages of a big city.

“It is attractive to young people, artists, developers, and the folks moving into these developments for the same reasons—it’s a thriving, artistic town,” he says. “And all of these people need to be careful that Portland remain just that.”

Peter McLaughlin’s Five Under-the-Radar Musical Paragons of Maine

Tom Kovacevic
Oud-playing Arabic music cognoscente. Weaver of delicate and idiosyncratic songs like no others.

Caethua
Enchanting hymns truly out of the forest. Makes bleakness resplendent like the winters she knows so intimately.

Big Blood
High priests of don’t-call-it-psychfreak-folk-new-weird-whatever-because-it’s-just-transcendent-goddamn-music.

Asa Irons
Exalted dirges, full of light and grit, like the salt of the New England earth. Always sounds like home.

Colby Nathan
Torch bearer and medium of feelings: nervous laughter, wide-eyed awe, honest tears, and subtle serenity.

Peter McLaughlin – owner, Pretty Purgatory
Portland, Maine
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Photography by Cara Slifka

The post Indie Music’s Maine Man appeared first on Take Magazine.