AUTUMN ART EXHIBITIONS
Artists Joan Busing, Sara Crisp, and Shelley Jordon will exhibit their distinct art work at the Maine Jewish Museum throughout September and October.
Reception: Thursday, September 6, 2018 5pm-7pm
Exhibitions: September 6 to October 26, 2018
First Friday Art Walks: September 7 and October 5, 2018, 5 pm-8pm
Moon Series │ Joan Busing
Monoprints
Spiegel Gallery
My life is my work. When I go to my studio to do these paintings, I think about color, form, and feeling. For the Moon Series, I studied the phases of the moon for many months before I began to interpret them. The circle is such a powerful image and so beautiful. My travels to New Mexico and Spain influenced my colors in a lot of my work. Color is very meaningful to me. The size of the plexiglass plates also dictates the composition as the forms begin to take shape. As an abstract artist, I use color and form to express my emotions and inner thoughts. The paintings (monoprints) represented in this exhibit are made up of many carefully registered painted plates that result in the one final work of art. It is a process. It is the process that excites me and propels me to do the next work.
New Work │ Sara Crisp
Fineberg Family Community Room
Embracing the sacred universality of the circle, Eastern spirituality, and the ability of a simple plant to symbolize life force, Crisp’s mixed-media and encaustic works incorporate delicate, meticulous patterning paired with botanical elements such as flower petals, stems, and seed pods.
Looser symmetry and more random patterning have evolved, conveying a joyous sense of musicality, spaciousness, and breath. In the artist’s words, the work is about “the contemplation of the sacred in the mundane, and the exalted in the universal.”
Crisp has mounted solo exhibitions throughout New England and New York. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, and received several awards and reviews. Crisp studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design and is represented by Denise Bibro Fine Art in New York City.
Forest Leaves & Family Trees │ Shelley Jordon
Third Floor Sanctuary
Shelley Jordon’s new shows: Forest Leaves & Family Trees in Portland, Maine, and Still Streaming in New York City, both open in September of 2018. For Jordon – who lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches as a Professor of Art at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon – the venues represent something of an East Coast homecoming; she grew up in Brooklyn, and has summered on Peaks Island in Maine since the 1980s. Forest Leaves & Family Trees, examines seasons, cycles, and generations, so both its setting (at the Maine Jewish Museum in the historic Etz Chaim Synagogue in Portland) and its timing (over the High Holy days, including the Jewish New Year) are fitting. The paintings in this show are a series of oversized studies of single leaves, or branches, gathered from the forest floor. It is as Jordon has chosen to do the opposite of “turning over a new leaf.” She insists, instead, on turning over an old leaf, and examining it minutely. At first, the rotting leaves and mossy tree limbs seem macabre subjects. Some have become hosts for new life, like fungus and bugs, but most are simply dying. In all of them, Jordon finds an eerie beauty within their moldering surfaces and decay, and translates it into paint. Some of the animations, like the leaf paintings, are brief spectacles of decay, but most tell extended stories from Jordon’s past and family history, including, Anita’s Journey which illustrates her mother-in-law’s childhood experience of hiding in Nazi Germany.
