New England Now

Peter Lyons, SNE 48010, 2015, oil on canvas, 40 x 60″.Courtesy of the artist.

Any art exhibition with New England in the title conjures up images of red barns, rolling green hills and quaint villages. Thankfully, none of that sentimentality is to be found in the Shelburne Museum’s New England Now exhibition—the inaugural show in a biennial series featuring contemporary artists organized around a theme. New England Now showcases 30 works by 13 artists.

The emphasis here is clearly on the “Now.” Human impact on the New England landscape is the primary subject communicated in this carefully curated show of paintings and photographs. Not a single figure appears in any of the work—as if time itself was stopped at the precise apocalyptic moment when all people disappeared, leaving behind their residue of gas stations, power lines, farm equipment and glowing lights illuminating vacant lots and empty apartment windows.

The museum’s curatorial team was well into the planning stages when they realized the selected pieces shared a common denominator of scale: large to monumental. The collective work envelops the viewer in an experience that encourages meditative contemplation while allowing each image its own space to breathe.

The rich textural, decaying surfaces in Calf Barn I (2015), 50 x 50 inches and Coal Shed I (2014), 30 x 76 inches appear painted, when in fact they are photographs by Jim Westphalen, a Vermont photographer who balances his fine art work with a commercial practice. Using a 4 x 5 film camera adapted for digital capture, he prints on acid-free rag paper using archival pigment and his own proprietary method. The results echo painters Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. Alternatively, the hard-edge clarity and sharply defined color in Peter Lyons’s work suggests photography, yet closer inspection reveals a painterly surface.

The nighttime aerial views of Shopping Mall, Rockland ME II (2003), 46 x 55 inches and MBNA (Credit Card Co.) Parking Lots I (2006), 40 x 67 inches by painter Yvonne Jacquette are arresting and disconcerting. While abstract, they also capture motion in that glimpse out the airplane window just as the ground comes into view before landing. In fact, these particular works, among her most inventive, were inspired by photographs taken from a helicopter at night that were then reworked in pastel and oil. Now in her 80s, Jacquette continues to live and paint in New York City while interrupting her city time with extended stays in Searsmont, ME. Her first nocturnal painting with an aerial perspective was a view of the East River in Manhattan done in 1978.

Nighttime also prevails in four of the six photographs of mill towns by Elke Morris and in the paintings by Linden Frederick. His Self Storage (2014), 65 x 65 inches is eerily empty. Storage units, those icons holding the detritus of our capitalistic excess, dot the New England landscape. Here, Frederick paints an isolated section of several units whose geometry suggests a modern-day Parthenon against a huge expanse of mysteriously painted inky blue-black sky.

Mill towns sprang up in New England in the early to mid 19th century. These company towns included multi-storied, usually wood clapboard, cheaply built housing units to accommodate the workers who supplied the labor force. The mostly textile and paper industries that gave birth to those towns have long departed leaving behind a hodgepodge of structures, some falling into disrepair but still providing affordable housing to those living on the margins. Morris has captured an odd, voyeuristic intimacy as we peer through the lighted windows of apartments in the evening shots of triple-deckers clustered together in Mill Towns 2, (2017), an archival pigment print, part of an ongoing photo series. She is currently a lecturer in art at Bates College in Lewiston, ME. Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and Germany.

There is much to admire and contemplate in New England Now. Loneliness, a fact of life for many in rural New England, emerges as a subtext. Hints of regret for a mythic past that may only have existed in a Currier and Ives print linger, even as we admire the attention to detail each artist brings to their study of the land as it is in the current moment. Given the exceptional results of this curatorial effort by director Thomas Denenberg and assistant curator, Carolyn Bauer the next New England Now looks promising. —Cynthia Close