Review: Maine
Flight
Cove Street Arts
Portland, ME
covestreetarts.com
September 24-December 5, 2020
In her introduction to “Flight,” artist and exhibition curator Lissa Hunter reminds us that words often have meanings “other than the first to come to mind.” Taking that to heart, Hunter gathered seven Maine-based artists (including herself) who convey the concept of flight through objects and images that are fanciful, dark, provocative, timely, and uniformly engaging.
Tim McCreight, Take Off! (2020)
Designer, teacher, author and metalsmith Tim McCreight chose to think of flight in terms of paradox: “up and down, float and sink, dream and shudder.” He also turned to humor: each of his six pieces has a tongue-in-cheek quality. Icarus Goes Solar, a set of wings created from broomstraw, thread, paper and glass solar panels, recalls a Leonardo da Vinci invention.
Using lithographic crayon, relief ink and charcoal, Kathleen Florance pays stunning tribute to some of nature’s airborne entities: a butterfly, a bee and milkweed pods dispersing seeds. By contrast, her Flight of Ideas is a colorful abstract riff on the theme.
Printmaker Lisa Pixley’s No, You Let Go, a hand-colored drypoint print, is a dramatic representation of two eagles in a death grip falling through the air. Reminiscent of some of Walton Ford’s allegorical naturalist illustrations, the image of our nation’s symbols, upside down, unwilling to quit their struggle, speaks to the present state of affairs.
Lissa Hunter’s charcoal and pigment on gessoed paper pieces feature flocks of birds arising from or disappearing into darkness. One of them, Fire Flight, might be referencing the loss of birds in recent times due to climate change, including the fires raging in the West. The fleeting forms fill a sliver of glowing sky above a dark forest-like mass.
The team of Gayle Fraas and Duncan Slade are known for their art quilts. They present three of them here, plus a 24-panel silk hanging piece and four narrow vertical water-based media drawings. Star-filled skies feature prominently in several works, overarching Maine coast landscapes. Here flight is a kind of escape.
Ceramist Paul Heroux’s “Forlorn Figures” series is the most topical of the work on view, incorporating the infamous image of the spikey COVID-19 virus hovering in the air, in some cases seemingly threatening the shadow silhouettes of people. The five soda-fired stoneware pieces are fittingly dark, yet also hazy and lustrous. They bring to mind ancient Greek vases.
The virus is also reflected in Lin Lisberger’s 20 Walks—COVID, a free-standing floor sculpture featuring an assortment of small colored pencil drawings attached to a chair. The drawings offer various vignettes—trees, fish market, harbor scenes—from excursions around Portland. The one exception is a panel featuring a quotation from artist Alan Magee’s song “Singing in the Dark Times” inspired by a poem by Bertolt Brecht. On the evidence of the work in “Flight,” a paraphrase of a line from the song seems appropriate: “There will be art in the dark times.”
–Carl Little