Depending on which door you walk in, SPACE Gallery in Portland, Maine, is either a theatre, a traditional art gallery, an artist studio space, or a presentation hall. But to new executive director Kelsey Halliday Johnson, the organization’s greatest strength is its ability to “cross-pollinate” into a variety of arts and forms.

The non-profit formed in 2002, grew into a large space on Congress Street and helped anchor a burgeoning arts district for the city. Two years ago, after a capital campaign, SPACE bought its building and is now positioned to become a major gallery player for artists from around New England and beyond.

When Take sat down with SPACE Gallery’s new director, she had only been on the job about three weeks. Johnson, 31, was born in Philadelphia and previously held positions at the Michener Art Museum, Locks Gallery, Vox Populi, the Penn Museum, and has taught photography and digital arts at the University of Pennsylvania and Interlochen Center for the Arts.

As set designers in the adjoining theatre hammered away, getting the room ready for a play that weekend, Johnson talked about the draw of a regional gallery, the scale of her expanding organization and the challenges of modern art.

Take: What is it like coming to Portland from Philadelphia? Are there similarities? What did it take to make the leap in geography and scale?

Kelsey Halliday-Johnson: The geography was easy because Maine is really beautiful. I was very excited about that. I’ve been coming to Maine for a long time and in fact had talked in the past about looking for cities to move to and Portland had been on that list. It’s funny though because Philly is a city very much in the shadow of New York and that really affects the cultural sector where there’s only a couple of major commercial galleries and artists get to a certain level of their career and they move to New York or LA. I’ve always shied away from moving to New York and I’m very interested in regional art histories and a non-New York dominated narrative of what contemporary art is, so in that sense it was really about finding another place to be where you can elevate the cultural practice that’s happening with contemporary artists that doesn’t have to be centered around the huge cultural vortex that actually ends up with a lot of incestuous and similar thinking. There’s a lot of exciting and creative projects that can happen outside of that.

T: You come from the James Michener museum. I would imagine that is a very different place than space.

KHJ: I used to also work at Vox Populi, which is a sort of collective model kindred to SPACE. So I was toggling many things to keep my artistic focus, but also expand my skill set. Michener was interesting because it was the first time I ever worked for something that was regionally focused, and I was drawn to how to bring a contemporary program to a regionally focused museum. It’s a special place and I’m interested in how a smaller place can have major art history programs and output. So I feel strongly about looking a little deeper, to be locally focused but national and globally minded.

T: So do you look at SPACE as regional or a national organization?

KHJ: Good question and something I hope we can define in people’s minds and imaginations. I think a lot of people look at the website or something we do and ask if we have a local mandate. SPACE doesn’t but it also has a long history and strong commitment to elevating emerging to mid-career practitioners to larger opportunities and there’s something to be said about aiming for both of those things.

T: Given SPACE’s mutli-media approach to gallery space, how do you pull persons across the genre? In other words, how is someone who is interested in your film series, also come out to a play or gallery showing?

KHJ: Encounters with artists, for me, are the biggest draw. I love art history, but if you’re just reading or seeing, you hit your head against the wall because you want to find the source material. So the fact that we have artist and film maker talks means a lot. Those activities are a way people can realize art doesn’t happen in a vacuum. I’m interested in the idea that the arts are a form of research that has a process and a series of theorems and things that people pursue in their studio, and they reveal the evidence of that search in their final product.

T: As a new director, what’s the big priority, the thing that’s taking your brain space right now?

KHJ: Having worked at an interdisciplinary organization, I’m interested in seeing how we can most clearly explain what we do well and also to create a critical space for artists and their intentions. It’s easy to keep rolling and getting people in the doors for events, but I want to make sure we’re building better archives and creating opportunities for writing and dialogue. I want to be able to explain to people contextually what’s on view. There are people who see contemporary art and don’t feel welcome, so my work right now is to create a sense of “come in and let’s talk about what you see.”

T: Where does SPACE stand in Portland? How are you unique here?

KHJ: I’m in a period of active listening, but my sense is there is a magnetic draw with a certain audience that has been at the heart of this loyal community for a long time. But I also think there are people who walk by our doors and have no idea what we do or who we are. But this is a true arts district that’s going to last and SPACE is crucial to that.

Kelsey Halliday Johnson–executive director, SPACE Gallery
Portland, Maine
Website
Instagram

Top image, Kelsey Halliday Johnson

The post Finding Space in Portland appeared first on Take Magazine.

The dark, depopulated landscape paintings of Dozier Bell have earned her a reputation as an elegist, but her work and her ideas are far more unorthodox than that. For the past eight years, Bell has been mining the landscape around Bath, Maine, to see “how non-traditional I could make a traditional landscape look.” The majority of her pieces show natural scenes, but she never paints outside. “I like painting from memory because I like using that filter,” she says. “It’s a back and forth between being outdoors and the studio routine.”

A descendant of farmers, Bell keeps bees, hikes, and kayaks regularly to discover new visual details. “I pick through literature the same way I pick through the landscape for what I can use.” For example, “in recent years I’ve been doing drawings and paintings of trees which I haven’t done before. I have a sense impression of what looking up into a pine tree might look like but I can’t always bring to mind the exact pattern of light and dark so I go out.”

Outcrop Flock, by Dozier Bell

After earning a B.A. in philosophy from Smith College, Bell studied under Neil Welliver at the University of Pennsylvania. She took two things from him that still inform her practice: “the necessity of tuning into one’s individual voice, and the importance of just putting in the hours in the studio that it takes to find that voice.” If you log the hours, Bell says, “you end up with a body of work.”

Bell’s own body of work reveals an abiding interest in German Romanticism. Recently, the threat of climate change has plunged her back into German stories where “the landscape, animals, plants, and the weather were characters in the drama,” and as such, capable of “retribution, spiritual solace, or some kind of divine purpose.” This concept of nature has “an inescapable moral dimension” that helps her to reckon with an increasingly unpredictable environment.

22:00, 2014. acrylic on linen, 30” x 50”, by Dozier Bell

While in Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship, Bell took stock of the landscape WWII had marked and also witnessed a new kind of religious questing. While volunteering at a local Lutheran Church she met East Germans who were beginning to explore religion again after reunification. “I saw these parallels between the fighting and finding devices like sonar and radar that were developed during the war, and the spiritual finding devices or process people were going through with religious training.” The conflation of these two very different kinds of human searching still moves her today.

Inspired as they are, Bell’s landscapes are omniscient and therefore slightly ominous. A number of her seascapes feature the geometric lines of remote sensing weapons, as if the viewer were training a rifle on the waves. The artist insists however that the lines of a viewfinder don’t always impend violence: “they could be weapon sights, they could be the crosses on a Réseau plate used in photographing an unfamiliar area like the surface of the moon…” With her paintings, Bell gathers together weapons, radar, and religious longing with the one sense they all share: sight.

Dozier Bell–artist
Bath, Maine
Website

Top image, Rising, acrylic on panel, 12″ X 16″, photo courtesy of Dozier Bell

The post Nature’s Morals appeared first on Take Magazine.

For Maine sculptor Lin Lisberger, each sculpture represents “a moment in time and space and the life of a tree.” Born in Connecticut, Lin came to summer camp in Maine as a child and decided to move to the Pine Tree State in 1975. “I’ve lived in the woods of Gorham for over 30 years,” she says. “I am very lucky to have this natural environment as a background and a backdrop.”

Lin Lisberger, BLT, Luc Demers photo

While Lisberger has worked in all mediums, including metal and stone, she prefers wood. “Wood is forgiving but not too forgiving,” she says. “It’s heavy but not too heavy. I can carve, construct, take it apart, and put it back together again.”

It was an injury that led Lisberger to sculpture. While studying English and American Literature at The University of California at Santa Cruz, she hurt her hip taking a modern dance class. The injury forced her to drop the class, so she took sculpture to replace it because she couldn’t see herself taking all academic classes. Her childhood memories of watching her mother, who sculpted and called herself a “sometimes carver,” influenced her decision.

Initially, Lisberger spent a few years as a studio potter in Monmouth, Maine, after receiving her BA, but then decided to go to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania to earn her MFA in sculpture. “I loved making pots,” she says, “but really wanted to make sculpture and to carve.”

Lin Lisberger, See Through, Luc Demers photo

Studying sculpture gave Lisberger an understanding of surface, edge, and form. “I would have learned it on my own,” she says, “but I am in favor of education for interaction.”

Using all local wood, Lisberger says her work is “very specific to Maine.” Her sculptures are carved directly from “whole or laminated healthy native wood.” Maine is a wonderful place to be an artist, she says. “Artists in Maine are allies. They aren’t cutthroat or competitive. You are surrounded with supportive people and camaraderie.”

When she’s not in her studio, Lisberger is an instructor of sculpture, drawing, and 3D design at the University of Southern Maine. Her work has been in exhibits throughout New England.

Lin Lisberger- Sculptor
Portland, Maine
Website
Instagram

Photography by Luc Demers

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