exhibitions
Thunder Moon
Charles Duvall
Friday, July 5—Sept 30, 2024
In this installation, Maine artist Charles Duvall presents his new series of welded steel sculptures whose swirling curvilinear geometries each have a distinct life of its own. Fundamentally defined by curlicues, knots, and blossoms, each explores a personal vision of the artist . Brought together in the gallery’s Steelhouse South space, these works form a meditation on the empty mind, the full moon, and on our relationship with the surrounding untamed ocean landscape.
The steel structures were created with the Steel House Gallery space in mind. Charles bent 3/4 inch OD mild steel solid rod using a manual Diacro 4 ratchet prototyping bender. Mild steel is low carbon and relatively ductile. The structures sit on pink Deer Isle granite and are painted with Gamblin Artist’s Oils which have luscious working properties. Each color possesses unique characteristics in terms of texture, undertone, and tinting strength. The range of colors includes both historically accurate paints and modern, synthetically derived hues. Most are made with alkali-refined linseed oil as a binder, which creates a strong, flexible paint film and yellows significantly less than cold press linseed oil, the traditional binder in oil paints. Select colors use safflower oil as a binder. Not only are these vegetable oils completely non-toxic, but they are also used in health and beauty products, so you can trust in their safety.
Alewife Running
Chip Barchilon & Annika Early
Fri, Oct 6—Nov 18, 2023
Chip Barchilon (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist who re-imagines agency within altered structures of power. Drawing from fairy tales, ecology, and mycology, Barchilon’s work responds to past and present stories of place and pushes against the structures of power embedded within these histories. Through sculpture and works on paper, they create atmospheres of eerie beauty that prompt both enchantment and inquiry. Barchilon is a graduate of the Master of Fine Arts program at Maine College of Art & Design and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Barnard College of Columbia University. They have been supported by the George Van Amson Fellowship and SPACE Gallery’s American Rescue Plan Grant.
Annika Earley (she/her) makes intimate drawings, paintings, and prints about transformation, in-between states, and the experience of being a woman. She often uses German folktales as reference points in her work. Earley holds an MFA from Maine College of Art and an M.Phil from College of the Atlantic.
She has been a resident at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, ME, Hewnoaks Artist Colony in Lovell, ME, Monson Arts in Monson, ME, Pace House Residency in Stonington, ME, the Walkaway House in North Adams, MA and will be in residence at the Burren College of Art in Ballyvaughan, Ireland in 2024.
Earley has been supported by the St. Botolph Foundation in Boston, MA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Albert K, Murray Fund, and SPACE Gallery’s American Rescue Plan Grant. Earley’s work is in the collections of the University of Southern Maine and the College of the Atlantic. Her work has been most recently exhibited at Zero Station in Portland, Maine.
In Our Own Backyard
WILLOUGHBY LUCAS HASTINGS
Fri, Sep 1—Sep 12, 2023
Originally from Huntsville, Alabama, and currently based in Rockland, Maine, Willoughby Lucas Hastings is an interdisciplinary research-based artist working primarily in textiles, photography, video, and sculpture. Her work examines the aesthetics, traditions, and systems of whiteness, especially within the American South and New England. She thinks critically about the environments we inhabit and how they can maintain or confront our personal biases. She produces works of self and societal critique that often incorporate textiles and photography to document and subvert the material culture of whiteness. As well as, producing protest banners and protest garments which are made in solidarity with queer, feminist, and antiracist activism and are constructed with donated materials.
Willoughby’s show is an ongoing series of redacted digital photographs are directly informed by the public Huntsville Historic Homes Database. Each location corresponds to the compiled list of 41 properties identified in the Database throughout greater Huntsville, Alabama that either openly acknowledged or substantially implied the enslavement of Africans and African Americans historically at that property.
About the Boat
Stephen Florimbi
August 4, 2023
Stephen was born in Philadelphia and moved multiple times throughout his youth including a five year period in Madrid, Spain. After graduating from University of New Hampshire with a degree in Resource Economics and minor in Studio Art, Stephen moved to Maine to be an Apprentice at the original Apprenticeshop in Rockport.
“There’s a real appreciation for the artist and artisan here. It’s a true community.” Says Stephen of his adopted state. In his over thirty year residence in Maine he developed a reputation in his community for being a highly competent craftsman and an artist who always made time to paint, keeping regular studio hours even while renovating his 1840’s home in Rockport and managing local boatbuilding yard Rockport Marine.
“Painting is the thing that feeds me most, it ties my life together. In Maine there’s beauty and inspiration everywhere.”
Minor Turbulence
Emma Wilton
Fri, Jul 7 — Jul 31, 2023
The Tipping Point
Amy Wilton
Jul 7 — Jul 31, 2023
Amy Wilton is a mixed media artist and photographer living in Camden, ME. Though her work in The Tipping Point, Amy’s creates bold, confrontational sculptures and mixed media paintings that take the viewer with her to that uncomfortable point in life where change, wanted or not, must occur.
Elysa Rose-Coster
May 6 — May 27, 2023
We are so grateful to host ceramicist Elysa Rose-Coster from the 6th of May to the 27th in the Steel House Gallery. Elysa’s ceramic art provokes reflection, action, and belonging.
BROTHER CAN YOU SPARE A LINE? Algorithmic Prints
Nate Davis
Jan 14 — Feb 11, 2023
Since 2008, Nate Davis has been creating algorithmic visual and sonic art that mimics organic processes of growth, inheritance, evolution, and decay. The works shown here are composed of millions of line segments and polygons, typically arranged in fractal patterns.
