May 10, 2018 – July 5, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 10th, 5pm-7pm
DaPonte String Quartet: Thursday, May 10th, 7:30pm
First Friday Art Walks:
June 1st and July 5th, 5pm-8pm
Artists’ Dialogue: Sunday, June 3rd, 2-4pm
Artists Rush Brown and Ted Arnold
will interview one another in this engaging exchange.
MUSICIANS
Ted Arnold
Spiegel Gallery
This is a series of paintings inspired by a performance of the All-Portland School Band and several band concerts in different districts thereafter. The school band is always on the endangered species list. Yet each year a small legion picks up the trombones of their ancestors, and with hope, fear, faith and sweat, begins the ancient human struggle to let our spirit out of its cage.
In the end it is about everything. Everything human that can be fit into it – passions and doubts and incapacities and sensualities, odd thoughts and curiosities. My work is about how little we can know, and how powerful that little can be.
Once, as a teenager in India, I looked under the hood of a car which had carried my family halfway to Agra before collapsing. The engine compartment was riddled with string, coat hanger wire and torn sheets wound tightly around hoses. An old stately goat herd appeared and pointed with his staff to something. That something was then wrapped tightly with something else and on to Agra. I have for some time felt that we are like that car. Patched and lashed and cobbled together, recovering from each blow with hanger wire, compensating for erosions with torn-sheet bindings. We are ridiculous miracles, pathetic miracles. Contradictions and inconsistencies are our mode of survival.
THE MUSEUM PAINTINGS
Rush Brown
Fineberg Family Community Room
Alex Sax’s exhibition “In Loving Memory” is a celebration of beauty, hope and freedom.
Sax presents a series of cut out black and white butterflies and small ink drawings and prints of the Maine Jewish Museum gardens. These images capture the magnificence of the natural world up close. Sax focuses on the shapes and textures of the flowers, building the images up with layers of marks. The drawings are reminiscent of old black and white photographs. Each image is a moment of becoming, and a reminder of our transitory time on earth.
Alex Sax is an artist who draws inspiration from nature and history. Working in different mediums from drawing to installation, Sax captures the spirit and energy of her subject. Her historical fiction installation “The Cobweb Club” at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine focused on the Cobweb Club (1890-92) which is thought to be the earliest women’s club in Washington DC. The installation included cast paper sculptures, prints and a wall painting based on the journals of Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat, founder of the club. Other installations of her work include “Material Matters,” Whitney Art Works, Portland, ME; “Altered Realities”, Westchester Community College Gallery, Valhalla, NY, and “A Shift in Scale,” The Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, CT. Sax has been awarded residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Weir Farm. Her permanent bronze sculpture and mosaic installation “Turtle Migration” commissioned by New York City Percent for Art and School Construction Authority is at Learners and Leaders School, NY. Sax received a BA from Hamilton College and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She lives and works in Portland, Maine.
OBSESSIONS
DaPonte String Quartet
On May 10 at 7:30 pm, the DaPonte String Quartet will conclude its season in Portland with “Obsessions”, which will explore three very different kinds of obsession in works by Hugo Wolf, Franz Schubert, and Bela Bartok. While Wolf’s “Italian Serenade” is a light-hearted look at young men smitten by love, Bartok’s Quartet No. 2 is the result of his obsession with the folk music of his native Hungary. And words like “enormous,” “massive” and “monumental” are always used to describe Schubert’s Quartet No. 15 in G Major, written in the last year of his tragically brief life.
The DaPonte String Quartet is Maine’s premier string ensemble. Founded in 1991 in Philadelphia, it moved to Maine over 20 years ago and now performs more than 50 times a year state-wide and year-round, as well as touring the Northeast.
Tickets are $25 and are available at
www.DaPonte.org and at Longfellow Books. For more information, call 529-4555.
