Above Below Before Behind Within
Eileen Gillespie, Rachel Zheng, Kristin Dillon, Heather Lyon + Frank Mauceri Five Maine artists working in painting, installation, photography, performance and computer programing – explore how their work addresses point of view.
October 4th-November 7th, 2018
Exhibition events:
Gallery Talks/C.A.U.S.E. pot luck lunch:
Tuesday, October 16th, 11:30am-12:30pm Frank Mauceri, digital drawing
Tuesday, October 23rd, 11:30am-12:30pm Eileen Gillespie, painting
Reception and Dinner Event:
Thursday, October 18th
Open reception - 5:00-6:00pm
Sit-down Dinner 6:00-8:00pm (Tickets required)
During the meal, a talk by installation artist Rachel Zheng and a performance by Heather Lyon.
TIckets $20 and $10 with student ID
Tickets available at UMAbookstore.com and click on the Danforth tab
The artwork provokes such questions as: does a work of art put the viewer in a unique place? Are you as an artist putting me in your shoes? Do you want me to see from a certain vantage point in order to gain perspective? Do you want to celebrate a space, person or an object differently?
Eileen Gillespie’s painting has become inspired by a bird’s eye view while sitting in a plane. Rachel Zheng’s “site-specific, sculptural installation of monofilament interrupts a familiar space and draws attention to architectural specificities.” Frank Mauceri uses “the computer as a tool for stipulating procedures and constructing systems; making marks that refer to, and resist, the gestures of drawing.” Heather Lyon uses her body to probe a depth of emotion, “video and performance work to explore the ways in which we negotiate longing, loss, power, and desire within interpersonal relationships.” And Kristin Dillon explores the relationship between people and their most prized possessions, “expos[ing] truths about each person while generating more curiosity.”
Frank Mauceri
I use the computer as a tool for stipulating procedures and constructing systems; making marks that refer to, and resist, the gestures of drawing.
I work to create processes, leaving traces I don’t yet recognize.
Beyond their mere existence, these traces invite me – and, I hope, others –
to discover and invent
the sense or meaning they have,
in the context of the processes that left them.
I depend on surprise and disorientation, both in the course of making work
and in my encounters with the finished result.
Frequently inspired by musical processes,
ordered movements in time make connections.
I am drawn to systems that organize materials at every scale –
where the logic of local actions accumulates to form large scale structure.
Rather than make the patterns I want, patterns emerge from the systems I want.
Kristin Dillon
Heather Lyon
My paintings are about land and water, growth and change. Rivers, oceans, agriculture and human development all mark and define landscape. I’ve seen the land from a bird’s eye view while seated in a plane and from eye level while walking through the woods. I attempt to capture and to celebrate the beauty found in different perspectives with paint. Eileen Gillespie was born in New York City and has lived and worked as a professional artist in New York City, Boston, Connecticut and Maine. She spent a year in Rome as a European Honors Program recipient at Rhode Island School of Design, for which she earned her BFA. Her time in Rome marked the genesis of a career long interest in architecture, structure in nature and a sense of place as a subject for her drawings and paintings. She continues to create work based on place. The places she lives, walks, or travels to. She received her MFA in painting at the University of Pennsylvania. Gillespie’s awards include Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts, The Hambidge Center, The Vermont Studio Center and a Fellowship at the Carina House on Monhegan Island, Maine. She is the recipient of a 2004 Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is currently based in Maine working in her studio and raising a teenager with her husband Tim Fahey and dog named Daisy.
Eileen Gillespie
Rachel Zheng
In an increasingly fast-paced, digital world, visual artist Rachel Lee Zheng seeks to heighten viewers’ perceptions of space. Zheng’s site-specific, sculptural installation of monofilament interrupts a familiar space and draws attention to architectural specificities. The disorienting relationship between the physicality of form and the immateriality of light directly engages with viewers, embodied within the work. Viewers are fully present, and highly aware of their spatial sensibilities through active engagement and curiosity.
Website Link: www.rachelleezheng.com
I’ve come to appreciate the relationships people have with their material possessions. Though they are surrounded by hundreds of objects, people tend to care deeply for very few of them, and those things are often only significant because they symbolize something else: a relationship, a passion, a time in their past, an aspiration.
To me, photographing folks in their homes with one of their favorite possessions is less a meditation on materialism and more a prompt to wonder what this object represents. I’m interested in collaboration and by presenting these people with their chosen objects, I am asking them to help write their own narratives. I hope to expose truths about each person while generating more curiosity.
Milk, sequins, rebar, soil, ash, and cloth are materials Lyon uses in her installation, video and performance work to explore the ways in which we negotiate longing, loss, power, and desire within interpersonal relationships. She uses her own body as both the creator and the created questioning the passage of time, repression of the sensual (embodiment) and the multiplicity of reality. Through the act of empathic witnessing we are also included in this transformational / experiential space.
