Expectations Of Place

Jenny Brillhart, Summer House, extra soap, 2018, oil on canvas, 11 x 14″. Courtesy of the artist.

With its many nooks and alcoves, the Cynthia Winings Gallery, a renovated barn that was home to the Judith Leighton Gallery, is custom-made for group shows. For Expectations of Place, eight Maine-based artists—Jenny Brillhart, Christine Lafuente, Carol Pelletier, Carrie Scanga, Diane Bowie Zaitlin, John Wilkinson, Lunaform and Melita Westerlund—share work that manifests varied takes on how we approach places distant and near-at-hand.

The 12 engravings in Carrie Scanga’s series Iceblink were prompted by scrapbooks that Marie Peary Stafford, daughter of Arctic explorer Rear Admiral Robert Peary, Sr., assembled during her 1931 journey to Greenland to build a monument to her father’s expeditions. Drawing on Stafford’s photographs and journals, from UNE’s Maine Women Writers Collection, Scanga prints stencil monotypes of items mentioned on the first day at sea onto engraved images of Arctic seascapes using various inks that lend an iridescence to the prints. The images are haunting in their simplicity and resonance.

Several of Jenny Brillhart’s oils feature pieces of humble interiors—her specialty. Summer House, extra soap is a study of a part of a troughlike sink with two holders bearing bars of white soap—a study in geometry that has the quiet completeness of a Morandi still life.

Diane Bowie Zaitlin is an abstract painter who seeks to represent the “dynamic sense of rhythm, internal energy and the pulse” of her natural surroundings in her mixed-medium works. New Growth, oil and cold wax on cradled birch, testifies to the success of this endeavor, displaying an expressionist verve in color, texture and form.

Christine Lafuente wields a lively brush in her painterly seascapes and still lifes. Zinnias and Lemons by the Acadian Sea combines the two, placing a colorful arrangement of flowers and fruit on a windowsill overlooking the Downeast coast. By contrast, Carol Pelletier leans to the atmospheric in her landscapes. In Blush, an oil and cold wax medium on panel, an ethereal landform lends a horizon to a vaporous vista.

John Wilkinson’s hard plaster and concrete sculptures and several curvaceous hand-turned garden vessels by Lunaform lend an engaging 3-D component to the mix—and add another twist to our expectations of place.