Artist Ethan Hayes–Chute thinks a lot about the spaces we inhabit and how we experience them. His three-dimensional installations, built from salvaged wood and other materials, reflect his thoughts on self-sufficiency, self-preservation, accumulation, and nature. “I’m enchanted with working in different mediums, at different scales, and offering different entry points for people to encounter my work,” he says. His current work, a photographic series called Beacons, is part of We Might Climb a Tree, at Least, an exhibition celebrating naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau at the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts (MMPA) through January 27th, 2018.

The photos in Beacons, shot in the woods surrounding Hayes-Chute’s family camp on Lake Sebec in central Maine, juxtapose the familiar (ordinary household lamps) with the ominous (a dark forest). Each lamp, pictured hanging from a tree, creates a small, familiar circle of light. “My inspiration for the series happened by accident,” Hayes-Chute says. “I was working outside at the camp with a lamp and was really taken by the light’s interaction with the leaves against the darkness.”

A builder and maker during his childhood in Freeport, Maine, Hayes-Chute became fascinated constructing small sculptures and miniatures as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design. His family (his father, James Chute, is an artist who recommended the Beacons series to MMPA Director Denise Froehlich) and experiences growing up in Maine are reflected in his art. “The settings and similarities I create or recreate from imagination and my family history creep in quite often in my work,” says Hayes-Chute. “I’m always happy to have those moments.”

From the series Beacons, 2015, Digital C-Print, 18 x 27 inches. Photo courtesy of Ethan Hayes-Chute. 

Last year, Hayes-Chute used his maker skills to explore familiarity in a space, building a room-size workshop — complete with with workbench, tools, and assorted odds and ends — in an installation at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. More recently, with collaborator and Finnish performance artist Dafna Maimon, he combined large-scale installation with performance art by creating Camp Solong. It’s an immersive three-day summer camp for adults emphasizing play, community, and the universality of saying “goodbye,” whether to others or to one’s emotional baggage.

Camp Solong, Dafna Maimon and Ethan Hayes-Chute, 2016 – (ongoing), as seen in the garden of Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany, 2016 Photo by Mike Terry

Hayes-Chute and Maimon built the camp, a one-walled cabin with a roof, platform, and eight bunk beds with a table and benches, which pops up each summer in different locations, including Finland and Germany (Hayes-Chute hopes to bring it to Maine). “I always wanted to integrate performance in to my work and activate my own structures,” Hayes-Chute notes. “Dafna and I came up with the idea of summer camp through discussions about how people need to learn how to empathize and communicate with each other.”

Hayes-Chute is also experimenting with video. His “New Domestic Woodshop,” a humorous riff on popular do-it-yourself television shows and YouTube videos, was developed for CONGLOMERATE TV, a collaborative project in Berlin. As the host, Eth, Hayes-Chute uses the many materials he has in his workshop to solve minor problems (for example, in this video, how to create a lap desk that enables him to work from bed). His next project is creating an experience around making customized cooking spices, a theme touched on in his installation at the List.

Whether it’s video, performance art, or large-scale installations, Hayes-Chute is still tinkering. “I want people to see these collections of objects and have the experience of seeing something familiar,” he says.

Ethan Hayes-Chute, Artist
Freeport, Maine/Berlin, Germany
Website
Instagram

Top image: List Projects: Ethan Hayes-Chute, 2016, installation view at MIT LIST Visual Arts Center, wood, found objects. Photo by Peter Harris Studio

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When the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts opened about seven years ago, co-founder and director Denise Froehlich, who is also a photographer, saw the museum as a way to give Maine photography a presence in the American conversation about art. The current exhibit of work by Meggan Gould, on view through September 30th, is a good example, she says. “The work is about the process and tools used in making photographs,” Froehlich says. “It is modernist in style and really, very smart.”

That’s true of so much of the work on display at MMPA. We emailed Froehlich to find out more about her hopes for the museum—its mission, exhibits, and her thoughts on the future (and present) of photography. Here’s what she had to say.

Denise Froehlich

What was it that inspired you to start MMPA? And why did you choose to open it in Maine?

DF: In 2010, when we launched MMPA, there were only a smattering of idiosyncratic photography collections throughout the state and photographic exhibitions were scant and mostly historically based. People were coming from all over the world to study photography at the ME Photo Workshops and our colleges and were making images here, but contemporary works weren’t being exhibited or collected by local museums. We likened this to plein air/landscape painting in Maine in the 1800s. MMPA decided that we would exhibit and collect contemporary photographic works by Maine artists. Because photography is linked to science and technology, it’s ever shifting in creation and representation. We want to bring the most avant-garde work being made in the state to the public and collectors. Also, the medium is shifting and no longer just flat and two-dimensional. Photographers are reaching forward to contemporary art that bridges the gap between drawing, sculpture, installations, film and projections, and painting. They’re also looking back and creating works with antique processes like daguerreotypes, cyanotypes, etc., by concocting their own emulsions or making camera-less imagery. This is important and needs to be collected.

The MMPA mission notes that the museum seeks to “inspire, engage and educate.” What would you say is the role of photography—as an art and as a tool of documentation—in 2017, when nobody seems to believe anything they see, read, or hear anymore?

DF: Ah, documentation is one way to use the medium. Our government is doing this well; the average person is photographed 75 times a day, and now we are installing facial recognition software into airports. Surveillance is real. Photography, film, and video are only tools like a typewriter or keyboard. It’s up to the artist to make art or communicate an idea to an audience. Form + Content + Context = Art.

How has the art of photography changed since the introduction of the iPhone 10 years ago? Where do you see it heading?

DF: I like to think about the iPhone or camera phone’s popularity and compare it to the Brownie camera that became available in 1900. The Brownie was a cheap, easy-to-use box that would bring the idea of a snapshot to the masses. Because it was inexpensive and readily available, thousands of people used them. Did they make “art” with them? Some did.

What do you think is misunderstood about photography?

DF: Because photography is so linked with in-the-moment technology, people think that anyone can create great art with it. Like painting or sculpture, it requires time, craft and skill, and, most of all, a unique voice and point of view. Look carefully, slowly, and ask yourself, ‘What does this image mean?’ If the intent and content is there and the formal qualities are worked out, and the audience is clear, chances are you’re looking at art.

What would you like to accomplish with MMPA in the next year?

DF: As director, I would like to collaborate with other institutions and bring Maine art to focus in the U.S. We are growing our small collection, and I would love to have exhibitions traveling. Of course, because we are small and recent—we’re in our seventh year—growing our operating budget is also a very real goal, too. Maine photographic artists are creating amazing things that need to be shared with the public. My hope is that we can expand our nonprofit and accomplish more. So far, every year we gain in reach, popularity, and depth of exhibitions.

Denise Froehlich–director, co-founder
Maine Museum of Photographic Arts
Portland, Maine
Website
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Top image: Meggan Gould, Bob’s, November 19, 2012, pigment print, 24 x 30 inches, photo courtesy of Maine Museum of Photographic Arts

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