Patches Within Proximity
USM: Area Gallery | Portland, ME
March 12th – April 30th 2010

Using photographic, painterly, drawing, and design processes, Cole Caswell and Jessica George explore the dynamic shape of ecosystems within our local landscapes. Caswell states: “Using technology and mobile data I engage and record the contemporary landscape through a practice, which considers the evolution of the landscape’s conditions.”

Caswell and George each received an interdisciplinary M.F.A. from the Maine College of Art, and have been working, living, and observing on Peaks Island. Over the last few years they co-founded The Geographic Observatory. The Geographic Observatory uses systems of observation, perception, and exploration to form cross discipline perspectives on relationships between community and the landscape.

There, there
Antfarm | Raleigh, NC
March 5th -March 20th 2010

Her There, there… installation uses common objects (like 35mm slides, furniture, and cookies and milk) to explore ideas of fictive nostalgia and familial comfort and loss. Check out her blog to track the installation’s progress and read her thoughts about the project.

Themselves Has Been a Gathering: Vessel #2
Bauchhund Gallery | Berlin, Germany
February 13th – March 13th 2010

photos: Tina Zagyva

The MECA viewbook for Admissions won the Silver category from CASE Communication Awards. Congrats to designer Janet Friskey/Friskey Design, writer Gabe Goldberg, photographer Richard Howard and project manager Molly Hunt.

Amanda Begins ‘09 won the only award for Maine at the AIGA Best of New England awards. Begins entered the competition as a student and was one of four students to take home an award at the ceremonies held at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

The Portland Phoenix named the 200 most influential people in Portland. Kudos to those in the MECA community: MECA staffers Lauren Fensterstock, Jay Cornell and Jessica Tomlinson as well as alumni Lisa Pixley, Randy Reiger, Aaron Stephan, Sean Wilkinson, Katie Diamond, Brooke DeLorme and Michelle Souliere.

EXHIBITIONS
Illustration faculty member Alex Rheault is included in a show at the Silvermine Guild Arts Center, located in New Canaan, CT, opening on February 28th and running through April 9th.

The Faces of Literacy exhibition, featuring portraits taken by MECA photography students and alumni, traveled from the Saco Museum to the State House Welcome Center in Augusta.

ALUMNI
Sasha  (Johnson) Eisele ‘04  was hired as the Creative Economy Coordinator for the Arts Alliance of Northern New Hampshire.
Randy Regier MFA ‘07 is showing in the DeCordova Biennial. In a review by the Providence Phoenix: “Portland artist Randy Regier’s work is just beginning to be known, but he may be one of the best sculptors in the country.” In a review in the Boston Globe: “Randy Regier has installed one of the coolest, most eye-catching flying machines never to have existed.”

The alumni poster project is online. See the posters about alumni careers, made by students in the graphic design department.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mainecollegeofart

GRANTS
MECA received three grants to complete the restoration of the Porteous Building. The Maine Arts Commission provided $15,000 to equip Osher Hall, MECA’s 112-seat lecture hall with ADA technology to ensure full accessibility, the Quimby Family Foundation supported the overall Porteous project with a $40,000 gift, and the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation has issued a $200,000 challenge to the College to raise the final funds to complete renovations on the third and fourth floors to accommodate the move of the Photography Department from the recently sold Baxter Building.

MECA also received a $2,500 grant from the Maine Charity Foundation Fund of the Maine Community Foundation and a $5,000 grant from the Morton-Kelley Charitable Trust to support the reinvigoration of the holdings of the Joanne Waxman Library to better serve the College’s curriculum.  These grants contribute significantly to a fundraising effort to purchase 500 new titles to replace important areas now missing from the collection in fine art, design and photography.

NEGOTIANTS + TRANSITIONERS
Raymond LaFontaine Art Center | Gardner, MA
February 1st – March 6th 2010

Read the full essay (and see more images!) on the Circle into Square website.

The space itself is comprised of our main wall which is 9’ X 14’ wide. The space is not restricted to only 2D work. At the threshold of our office is a digital LCD projector affixed to the ceiling for projection and sound. Video would loop during business hours Monday –Fridays.

Deadline: March 15th 2010
To Submit Work: click here to apply.
Contact: Stacy Howe MFA ‘10, Gallery Coordinator
(showe [at] meca [dot] edu)

Telepathic Drawing Session
Articule | Montreal
March 24-27, 2010

I’d say I’m transmitting it. If someone picks it up, then that’s communication. Someone might pick it up a thousand years from now. Someone might pick it up five minutes before I’ve thought about it. You see, because that sort of transcends time and space, and these things sort of exist for all time, so to speak.

Robert Barry speaking with Patricia Norvell about his telepathic pieces, May 30th 1969

“Black Holes 2008″ by Leah Garnett

Telepathic Drawing Session is a modest (if not largely invisible) project which brings together fascinations with extra-sensory perception, preoccupations with conceptual art, and a special interest in the expansiveness of Canadian geography and its scalar restraints on collaborative artistic practice. Rebecca Duclos’ proposal results from of a series of explorations that have brought together research on the 1960s telepathy works of Robert Barry with Ted Serios’ parallel experiments in photographie de la pensée in order to propose a project in which telepathic communication is used to generate images between remote individuals. Telepathic Drawing Session proposes a new model for a thoughtful, collaborative art practice that strives to overcome the pesky limits of time and space—so long a perennial problem for Canadian artists hoping to work with one another across provincial boundaries without the financial assistance of travel grants, the luxury of residencies, or access to unlimited Air Miles. Duclos will work with artists Donna Akrey, Jon Knowles, and Leah Garnett for a one night performance in which drawings will be transmitted between Montreal, Quebec and Sackville, New Brunswick using telepathy and live radio broadcasts.

Recent Paintings by Anna Shapiro
BankRI Pitman Street Gallery | Providence, RI
January 7th – February 3rd 2010

“I really love making things about beauty,” says Anna Shapiro, “even if they’re not beautiful.” The founding director of Firehouse 13 has made a big dent in the local arts scene in the last few years. Between her paintings and her sculptures, she is constantly at work. “I’m always exploring the juncture of humans and nature in some way. I have an eco-feminist perspective. I’m interested in how the earth is treated, how the land is treated, and how women are treated.”

Portland artist Randy Regier’s work is just beginning to be known, but he may be one of the best sculptors in the country. In the 2010 DeCordova Biennial at the DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, Regier has installed Honorable Mention: H. Maxwell Fisher and the Space Race, a “life-size” spacecraft, spacesuit, and related ephemera. Your senses tell you this wondrous, crackpot 1950s Buck Rogers dream machine is real. And you — particularly if you’re a certain kind of boy — may want to believe it’s real. But your mind insists that it’s fake. The result of this contradiction is a pleasurable mental short circuit.

The Fisher Fire Fly spacecraft is a ball-shaped capsule atop a cone-shaped thruster with three landing-gear legs. It’s painted Wizard of Oz emerald green. The top of the capsule is scuffed and blistered, as if scorched during passage through the earth’s atmosphere. Peer inside the open hatch and you find a metal-frame seat, wires, hoses, switches, and dials. Everything appears authentically old, right down to the musty industrial smell.

Read more online.