Life Forms
Corey Daniels Gallery, Wells, ME • coreydanielsgallery.com • Through October 15, 2024
Life Forms, a series of exhibitions that will take place in different venues across Maine over the next four years, kicks off with this showcase of the twelve artists in the collective: Leah Gauthier, Jackie Brown, Lynn Duryea, Kazumi Hoshino, Elaine K. Ng, Bronwen O’Wril, Ashley Page, Veronica Perez,
Celeste Roberge, Naomi David Russo, Ling-Wen Tsai, and Erin Woodbrey. It’s a diverse and brilliant line-up.
Roberge’s Seaweed Will Be Lapping at Your Doorstep #2 envisions the future by way of a pair of wax cast seaweed-covered Muck boots—“imaginative survival gear,” she calls them. In a like manner, Woodbrey presents single-use plastic containers for surface cleaners and water, covered in ash, plaster, and gauze—effigies of consumer goods (or bads).
By contrast, Russo offers fanciful practical creations, Squiggle Mirror and Coil Lamp, each incorporating curved elements that enhance the wall fixtures. The small white oak pieces in O’Wril’s Pick Me Up also play on curvature, smooth shapes that might be part of a puzzle. Elsewhere, Page’s wire constructions, Black and Porous and Black Seed, are loose and linear.
Duryea’s terracotta Slant #19 and Tilt are soft-toned and engagingly off-center—constructivist yet warm—while Brown’s 3-D printed ceramic sculptures Twister and Elemental, from her “Strata” series, are rough-hewn and organic. Hoshino’s Fragments of Memory highlights the textures of light and dark stone via an arrangement of five small tabletop sculptures.
Tsai’s Chair and Bench from her “Rising/Sinking” series might be stage sets for absurdist dramas, the simple wood furnishings embedded in square light-blue milk-paint platforms. Perez’s large-scale suspension, made from artificial hair, wood, and burlap, also seems theatrical, the conceptual centerpiece for an existential one act.
Wall works include Gauthier’s silk thread-on-linen pieces with acrylic and gouache, hypnotic in their circular precision/arrangement. Ng takes a different route, using plant-dyed cotton and eri silk to evoke silky rocks, a lumber pile, and a greenhouse roof.
Almost all the work in the show dates from the past couple of years. Future iterations of Life Forms promise to trace the evolution of this
dynamic dozen. Learn more about the series at lifeformsart.org.
— Carl Little