In the exhibit "You Are Not Alone," three artists investigate images evolved from imagination and the past — the spirits nearby who haunt us or love us or both, often just beyond our awareness. Sipe, Stanton, and Sabino each approach this unknown territory as an explorer, each with her own apprehensions, sensitivity, and the courage to discover whatever may appear.
Sally Stanton opens her intuitions to her “unquiet world,” a world intensely populated with many hundreds of figures, some tortured, some nurturing, some wounded, some half-animal, all with eyes open or half closed, staring into their own or your own soul. Her colors are incandescent, iridescent, luminous, balancing cool greens and blues with very hot oranges, pinks, lemon yellows, indicating the sharp clashes of emotion with which they emerge on the canvas. The intensity of her colors, her backgrounds brightly embracing her intense figures, create immensely satisfying and mysterious experiences.
At least 16 figures populate “The Burden of Gravity,” confronting, hugging, crying, protecting each other. And they are watching, always watching. Many seem masked, either directly or through the textures and colors of their features. Through this scraping, re-painting, finding and losing imagery, the closely packed figures finally appear, and Stanton acknowledges them. The process, she says, may never be fully complete, but at some point, she accepts them for whoever they are. And there is a major metropolis of them, a vast mirror of our own jarring and beautiful selves. Like watching street pedestrians, one recognizes some, wonders about — or even fears — others, falls in and out of love with yet more, all in seconds.
At least 16 figures populate “The Burden of Gravity,” confronting, hugging, crying, protecting each other. And they are watching, always watching. Many seem masked, either directly or through the textures and colors of their features. Through this scraping, re-painting, finding and losing imagery, the closely packed figures finally appear, and Stanton acknowledges them. The process, she says, may never be fully complete, but at some point, she accepts them for whoever they are. And there is a major metropolis of them, a vast mirror of our own jarring and beautiful selves. Like watching street pedestrians, one recognizes some, wonders about — or even fears — others, falls in and out of love with yet more, all in seconds.
Libby Sipe experiments with multi-media, also in bright, rich colors, also pushing her materials to reveal what needs communicating and healing. With peeled sheets of rubbery acrylic emulsion, modeled urethane foam, fuzzy flocking, crushed glass beads and garnet stone, gold leaf, cyanotype photos, yarn, cheesecloth, and sculpted epoxy, she drapes, molds, models, and drips the media into quite unexpected forms and images that come to her from her own at times difficult and traumatic past experiences.
Her earlier paintings on traditional rectangular supports are abstracted representations with dark, exploratory, and revelatory images in thick layers of bright acid green, violet, magenta, red, and orange. In these earlier paintings, Sipe felt free to dig deep into difficulties she had experienced in growing up and face the subjects that haunted her. It’s a layered archaeology of stories, faces and figures, once-stifled communications finally free. She credits both her husband and her beginnings in therapy with being able to break some of those chains. Confronting the difficulties head-on, she’s courageously created a new world of her own truths.
In her more recent work, she finds a new expressive freedom with many materials. Sipe has worked through her need for all the faces to make fully abstract works no longer based on memories or old photos. Her recent “I Faked It” and “Lousy Chameleon” are sheets of fabric-like “paint skins,” layers of acrylic paint built up and then peeled away to drape and fold over themselves with few references other than their own presence. She paints, gilds, and manipulates these skins to become ironic references for opulence, or tired old birch bark, or a fox re pathway for angels.
Her 3D constructions, “Chrysalis” and “Alice,” seemingly encrusted with vines, lichen, forest rot, light up from the inside and outside as one approaches, communicating their hidden life. She says that though she can’t change or deny the past, as an artist, she can regrow something healing over its bones, new growth over old scars.
Her earlier paintings on traditional rectangular supports are abstracted representations with dark, exploratory, and revelatory images in thick layers of bright acid green, violet, magenta, red, and orange. In these earlier paintings, Sipe felt free to dig deep into difficulties she had experienced in growing up and face the subjects that haunted her. It’s a layered archaeology of stories, faces and figures, once-stifled communications finally free. She credits both her husband and her beginnings in therapy with being able to break some of those chains. Confronting the difficulties head-on, she’s courageously created a new world of her own truths.
In her more recent work, she finds a new expressive freedom with many materials. Sipe has worked through her need for all the faces to make fully abstract works no longer based on memories or old photos. Her recent “I Faked It” and “Lousy Chameleon” are sheets of fabric-like “paint skins,” layers of acrylic paint built up and then peeled away to drape and fold over themselves with few references other than their own presence. She paints, gilds, and manipulates these skins to become ironic references for opulence, or tired old birch bark, or a fox re pathway for angels.
Her 3D constructions, “Chrysalis” and “Alice,” seemingly encrusted with vines, lichen, forest rot, light up from the inside and outside as one approaches, communicating their hidden life. She says that though she can’t change or deny the past, as an artist, she can regrow something healing over its bones, new growth over old scars.
Emily Sabino brought her two new friends together for this show when they all met at a Waterfall Arts exhibit last year that featured artists of the Midcoast Chapter of the Union of Maine Visual Artists. The title, "You Are Never Alone," ties together each artist’s practice in finding healing in the voices and images always near but often whispering just outside the edge of vision.
Sabino revels in Nature, especially the power of seeds to bring hope and renewal. She feels sentience in the natural world and feels surrounded by an intelligence with which we can be in constant celebratory communication. As a musician and drummer who brings the healing power of rhythm to her creative work, she feels the weaving together of rain, earth, growth, death, rebirth in an unending complementary cycle with the human condition. How could we be alone in such a world?
In “Planting Day,” five black hands infused with seeds, pods, the very plants they are sowing, hover above a green mountainous landscape where clouds, earth, and sky are about to converge in a moment of new creation. In “Seeds of the Future,” one of many circular images, a black, lightning-energized sky merges through an hourglass shape lled with seeds and fruits of all kinds, linking earth below with sky above. Seeds, she says, may be dry, brown, crinkled with age, yet when wetted and nurtured, they may reincarnate, still viable with life.
In "You Are Never Alone," each artist in her own way affirms the power of digging deep to nurture art’s mysterious capacity to discover one’s many connections to life. The exhibit quotes the ancient poet Rumi, “Do not feel lonely; the entire universe is inside you.”
Sabino revels in Nature, especially the power of seeds to bring hope and renewal. She feels sentience in the natural world and feels surrounded by an intelligence with which we can be in constant celebratory communication. As a musician and drummer who brings the healing power of rhythm to her creative work, she feels the weaving together of rain, earth, growth, death, rebirth in an unending complementary cycle with the human condition. How could we be alone in such a world?
In “Planting Day,” five black hands infused with seeds, pods, the very plants they are sowing, hover above a green mountainous landscape where clouds, earth, and sky are about to converge in a moment of new creation. In “Seeds of the Future,” one of many circular images, a black, lightning-energized sky merges through an hourglass shape lled with seeds and fruits of all kinds, linking earth below with sky above. Seeds, she says, may be dry, brown, crinkled with age, yet when wetted and nurtured, they may reincarnate, still viable with life.
In "You Are Never Alone," each artist in her own way affirms the power of digging deep to nurture art’s mysterious capacity to discover one’s many connections to life. The exhibit quotes the ancient poet Rumi, “Do not feel lonely; the entire universe is inside you.”