Jenny Smick was traveling in Mexico when her mom’s ovarian cancer recurred. Smick was 30 years old and had only a few obligations to consider before flying home to be with her: a handful of material possessions, an already temporary job teaching English, and an uncertain relationship.

Six months after Smick landed in Boston and traveled north to Sedgwick, Maine, her mother, Holly Meade, passed away. The next day, as usual, Smick flipped over the open sign at her mom’s art gallery in the tiny coastal town.

“I didn’t know what else to do. People stopped in. They connected with her through art. They loved her,” Smick said.

Meade raised Smick and her brother as a single mom on the coast of Massachusetts. Every summer Meade would haul her kids north to Maine, plunk them into a rundown Boston Whaler that only ran backwards, and ferry them across the bay to a small island off the coast of Harpswell. There they would spend a month or two roughing it, completely off the grid but in their favorite place on earth.

Smick recalls that she never realized the oddity of what was her life. The entire living room in her family’s Massachusetts home had been her mother’s studio, covered from floor to ceiling in different phases of whatever project Meade was working on. A 1978 graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, in 1992 Meade had landed her first job illustrating a children’s book. She went on to illustrate more than 30 books, including Hush! A Thai Lullaby by Minfong Ho, which brought her a Caldecott Honor for her artwork. It wasn’t until 2002 that Meade began making woodblock prints, the medium for which she is most known. After taking a class from Hester Stinnett at Haystack Mountain School, Meade began devoting nearly all of her time to the art form.

In 2003 Meade sold their home to begin a full-time life in Sedgwick and invest in two major purchases: a large-format, original print by Deer Isle printer Siri Beckman and a Whelan press—a major upgrade from pressing prints with the back of a spoon. For the next ten years Meade made art on the coast of Maine, drawing inspiration from her wild surroundings. When she got sick, neighbors came out of the woodwork to help however they could, from running her gallery to purchasing her home and letting her rent it so she could afford to stay in her spot by the sea.

In the months following her mom’s death, Smick took on a new and interesting role: the deceased artist’s daughter. And not just the daughter of any artist, but the daughter of Holly Meade—local sweetheart who just happened to create some of the most thought-provoking and beautiful woodblock prints of her time. Smick continued to run her mother’s gallery for several months after she passed away, offering a literal shoulder for people to cry on, while also processing her own grief over losing a parent at such a young age. Eventually, the situation became more bearable. She continued to work at galleries, narrowing her focus to her mother’s art, which sat in a pair of thousand-pound flat files in her home. She spoke about her mother’s art career at events, in newsletters, and even on webinars, reminiscing with complete strangers about the pure talent that Holly Meade possessed.

“Some people can’t talk about their parent who died; they can barely get through a sentence,” says Smick. “I can talk at length about Holly Meade because I’ve had to. And I love talking about her. She was awesome. But I wonder if I’m getting it right; I wonder if I’m saying something she believes, and I don’t know.”

Smick says her mom was in denial about death for most of the two-plus years that she was sick. It wasn’t until the final weeks that Meade got things in order. That’s when she told Smick she could burn all her artwork if it ever became too much.

“This is what’s happening when you have an artist parent. It makes me feel so good to share her work with people, but it’s also this huge physical and emotional burden that my mom never wanted me to have,” she says. “Obviously I don’t want to burn her work, but I’ve thought about it. It’s a little escape door that’s there that I don’t want to take, but it lets me feel like whatever I do is okay. I don’t have the pressure, and that’s what she would have wanted.”

Since becoming a mother herself six years ago, Smick says, she has even more respect for all that Holly Meade accomplished, and despite closing her mother’s gallery years ago, she still has strangers emailing her, looking for connection over her mother’s art. She continues to sell the prints, primarily through Courthouse Gallery Fine Art in Ellsworth. Smick also started an Etsy page and began selling Meade’s work in greeting card form, a format that she says she loves for its simplicity and accessibility.

In 2017 Smick compiled a book about her mother, Holly Meade Wood Block and Linoleum Prints (She-Bear Gallery, 2017), with reflections and images of nearly all of Meade’s work. The book sold out long ago, but Smick is considering a reprint in the next few years. She can glance at any one of her mother’s pieces and rattle off a detailed description of its history: when her mother created it, where she was living at the time, possible influences that may have been in effect. And a huge influence that runs strong throughout most of Meade’s prints is the quiet coast of Maine—the place that helped her raise her children, helped her find her career, and helped her ease into the idea of death.

“I’m never alone in missing her,” Smick says.

Read More:

• 
  The Immortal Life of Holly Meade
• 
  “Beyond the Brick” Brings Maine-Made Art and Music to Life
• 
  Watercolor Painter Abe Goodale Traces His Roots on 700 Acre Island
• 
  Shifting Dynamics Through the Power of Theater
• 
  Shifting Sequences: 2022 Juried Artist Exhibition

The post The Immortal Life of Holly Meade appeared first on The Maine Mag.

The small city of Ellsworth, Maine—just past Blue Hill and about thirty minutes from Acadia National Park—is undergoing a renaissance. The first step in breathing life back into the town? A brand-new outdoor mural by Mount Desert Island artist Judy Taylor. To celebrate the kickoff of Taylor’s piece, producer and director Kyle Lamont of Good To Go Studios was tapped to create Beyond the Brick, a multimedia collaboration of Maine artists and musicians that was projected onto a 3,000-foot wall at a pop-up art show over the summer. We sat down with Lamont to learn more about her studio, what makes Ellsworth special, and how Beyond the Brick came to be.

What is Good To Go Studios?

We are a production company that makes meaningful media. We specialize in films, podcasts, branded content, and marketing—we haven’t tapped into video games yet, but maybe soon! We’re multimedia storytellers, possibility thinkers, and creative problem solvers, and we absolutely adore working with writers, filmmakers, editors, animators, and other creatives and business owners.

What was the initial idea behind Beyond the Brick: A MultiMedia Maine Journey?

The idea was to take people beyond themselves, beyond the brick in downtown Ellsworth, Maine and back to see how our region is a direct reflection of ourselves. We set out to make a video that reminds us why we love Maine, to fill us with pride as we honor our state’s creativity and talent. Maine’s beauty is common ground for conversation and a catalyst for artists. That inspiration shines brightly in the piece.

The creative direction came after flipping through Carl Little’s book, Paintings of Maine, which has been sitting on my coffee table since I was a senior at Sumner High School in Sullivan. The artwork kept coming to life in my mind as animations. From there, the concept grew to include footage from film shoots and branded content campaigns I have produced and directed over the years. When it came to the soundtrack, I was moved to co-produce a soundtrack composed entirely of music created by Mainers.

The project was ambitious. In addition to the video, I co-produced a pop-up art show with the nonprofit Heart of Ellsworth where the intention was to project the film onto a 3,000-square-foot wall in support of our city’s first outdoor public mural. While there were a lot of moving pieces, it was a dream project. With my wonderful team—Jim Picariello, Ruthie Harrison, and Tara Rook, plus my production designer Theo Dumas, combined with the trust of Cara Romano and her team at Heart of Ellsworth—we were set up for success. Rounding out the team was my synergy partner, Heidi Stanton-Drew, who has a wonderful way of synthesizing ideas and making them soar.

What was your first thought when you were approached about the collaboration project with Heart of Ellsworth?

I’ve been in close collaboration with Cara Romano, Heart of Ellsworth’s executive director, for years. Her vision for the downtown Ellsworth district is inspiring and one I fully subscribe to. Culture is shaped by media, and I love the symbiotic relationship we have as I support and promote their mission by producing promotional videos, live streams, and photography. The Water Street mural project has been in the works for years, so it was an organic partnership to co-produce the pop-up art show and create the video projection to headline the event. Bringing more awareness to our community about this public art piece is a big step towards infusing more culture into our town.

How were artists selected for the piece?

Carl Little was our art director, and his passion and ability to articulate Maine art is a true inspiration. He selected more than 20 artists from our region, including James Francis Sr., who is also the Penobscot Nation’s Tribal Historian, and Jessica Lee Ives, an artist in Camden whose depiction of swimming in Maine’s lakes and quarries makes me melt. Together, with the help of Karin Wilkes from Courthouse Gallery, we curated a stellar lineup. From iconic Maine artists to budding high school art students, there is a wellspring of material from which to instill pride in our creative youth. I am so grateful to all the artists who shared their work for this piece. I hope it will inspire the next generation and manifest new possibilities of community engagement.

How was music selected for the video?

Thanks to Meg Shorette at All Roads Music Festival, I was introduced to the talented sounds of Tara Rook, a producer and musician based in Portland. Her ability to craft mixes and make music that touches a spiritual chord is why I called her up! She was super receptive to my idea of creating a Maine musical soundtrack, and before I knew it, we were off to the collaborative races. It was equal parts composing for the film and producing the film to her music. Because there is no dialogue in this video, the music had to communicate a variety of feelings. Once I figured out the emotional arc of the video, she worked her magic. I love how we introduced each other to Maine musicians we had never heard before. Our state’s music scene continues to amaze me.

Why Ellsworth? What makes Ellsworth special in your opinion?

I get this question a lot. The city has a strange reputation, and it’s not entirely undeserved. I love the contradictions, like how solitude and community are both available here. I love helping small businesses develop their brand by producing a video for them and seeing the results! As a media professional who often freelances out-of-state for commercial shoots, I always stay true to my ethos that Maine is more than just a pretty backdrop on a film set, but a viable hub for media makers. Ellsworth is a supportive spot to create, and its downtown has transformed culturally through the work of Heart of Ellsworth. I’m excited to see what comes next!

What’s next for Good To Go Studios?

We’re loving the podcast format! Our in-house show called Concert Cast (a Spotify Editor’s Pick) is a travel podcast exploring concert culture. Season one is a road trip around Maine that takes you from the State Theatre to Eureka Hall, Maine’s most remote venue in The County. Our experience in podcasting has led us to develop two more live music-based shows, and we’re also developing a true crime podcast from the coast of Maine.

The post “Beyond the Brick” Brings Maine-Made Art and Music to Life appeared first on The Maine Mag.

There are four old chairs in the artist’s studio, lined up against one unpainted wall. They are in various stages of aging; one is too old to sit in, one is sturdy and hale, one is questionable, and one looks almost new. When I take a seat, I don’t realize what I’m placing my bottom on. Later I learn that I’ve chosen my perch well. “That’s my Pop Pop’s chair,” says artist Abe Goodale. “This one, I like to think, was Charles Dana Gibson’s.” I tell him it’s a good thing I didn’t try to use that one. “Yes,” he responds, “I never use it. It’s too precious.”

Goodale is a self-taught painter with a vivid imagination who speaks with intensity and enthusiasm, even about the most mundane of family artifacts, like these four chairs. He is descended from a line of painters and illustrators, the most famous of which was Charles Dana Gibson, the inventor of the “Gibson Girl,” a nineteenth-century phenomenon that defined Gilded Age femininity: the blowsy haired, delicate featured girl was often depicted riding bicycles, playing tennis, and indulging in other athletic leisure activities. One of the most prolific and talented illustrators working at the turn of the century, Gibson had an influence on fashion magazines that can still be seen today. Not only did he document the world of the well-heeled, but he also shaped it with his incisive, witty captions and commentary.

Goodale’s studio, located on 700 Acre Island off the coast of Lincolnville, isn’t really his. It belongs to “the family,” a rather nebulous group of descendants bound by their shared history of summering on this picturesque island. The other members of their family have allowed Goodale to use the studio, granted him access to their various plots of land, given him permission to walk across their lawns, sketch on their cliffs, paint in their backyards. Throughout my visit to the island, Goodale gently directs our small group (Goodale, me, photographer Nicole Wolf, and Goodale’s two friendly dogs) toward common trails and away from porches. “Family politics,” he says at one point, in explanation. He may belong to this place, but it doesn’t belong to him.

His presence in this historic place is, he says, “an immense privilege,” one that he hopes to honor and repay through his art. Currently Goodale is working on a series of watercolor paintings that are directly inspired by a group of oils by Gibson. “This collection of paintings has never really left the island,” says Goodale of the original canvases. “They were shown once, in New York, in the 1930s and 1940s. But it is work that has never been seen, by an artist who is part of American history.” That alone is a big deal. It’s a major reason why the Maine Arts Commission awarded Goodale a grant in 2019 to develop this project. Goodale is trying to share and promote a piece of local history. He’s trying to tell a story that not enough people have had the chance to hear.

But there are other reasons to be interested in this work in progress. Firstly, he isn’t riding anyone’s coattails. Goodale is a talented painter whose pale watercolors beautifully capture the foggy, vague quality of days at sea. (He makes much of his money through commissioned paintings of boats and harbors, which he depicts with a deft hand and little color.) “Goodale’s portraits of fishermen are true to life, rough and ready men portrayed with cigarettes dangling from their lips or reaching for a line,” wrote art critic Carl Little in a recent issue of Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors. “There is an authenticity in these portraits that recalls some of Andrew Wyeth’s studies of Maine coast denizens.” Goodale was raised on a sheep farm in Montville, so he’s no stranger to physical labor, and thanks to his father’s connection to the island and the sea, he knows the working waterfront and its inhabitants intimately. He is able to capture Maine in a way that many outsiders couldn’t. He’s close to his subject, and it shows.

But Goodale’s ambitions are larger than simply sharing Gibson’s oils or showing his own watercolors. This is precisely what he plans to do, someday, when the entire project is finished. But Goodale doesn’t just want to add to the historic body of work. He wants to expand upon it, to respond to it, to give it new breath, depth, and texture. He wants to speak across time to his distant, famous ancestor, and in the process, he wants to spark something new. “The most important thing I want to convey with my work, with all my work, is that human-to-human connection,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if something is technically great. It matters if it speaks to someone.” He wants to take people to 700 Acre Island through his art, and to introduce them to the figures that loomed so large in his childhood—his great-great-grandfather Charles Dana Gibson, his uncle Peter Perkins Goodale, and his grandfather Robert Perkins Goodale.

It’s rather lofty stuff, but this is what often happens when you talk to an artist in the middle of a project. You get a vague cloud of an idea, wistful workings, a string of concepts punctuated sharply with examples, the rare specific that helps you see the full picture, like the beak of a nose drawn sharply across an otherwise blandly pretty face. “I’ve asked some of the people who sat for Gibson’s oils to sit for me,” Goodale reveals. Gibson’s grandchildren were a frequent source of inspiration for the painter, and some of them are still alive, still willing to be painted. “I want to go to the same places where he did his landscapes, and create them in my style, showing how the island has changed,” he says. He has also been working on painting the playhouses and chapel, a group of three charming, miniature stone cottages that Gibson built for his grandchildren on a grassy field overlooking the ocean. While it is unknown whether Gibson ever rendered these structures on canvas or in oil, it doesn’t matter. Goodale isn’t trying to recreate every one of the paintings his ancestor did on the island. “In some ways, this is an opportunity for me to fill in the gaps of his story,” he says. “I can represent these things he created, which were such an important part of my childhood, and I can share that with people.” Originally, Goodale had envisioned visiting the locations where Gibson painted and doing his own work in the same space, hanging those two bodies of work, separated by a century, in one show. But now, he says, “I think I want to include the other artists in my family. I want to incorporate text, maybe, to add depth and reference.”

Goodale is still figuring out the details of the show. He’s also grappling with the bigger questions that many of us stumble upon as we age: Where do I fit into the world? What role does my family history play in shaping my life? Where do I fit into my community and how can I be a good citizen? What can I give to the world that will last? For Goodale, the answers are still hazy, which means I trust him to deliver something thoughtful and real. Big questions get shaggy, rangy answers. Big stories aren’t told without digressions. “Right now, a lot of the work I’m doing is just being in quiet. I’m trying to be still and introspective, sitting somewhere and looking,” he explains. He’s not painting constantly or researching. He’s spending a good deal of his time on 700 Acre Island simply being. It’s getting him closer, he believes, to his goal. “In our culture, a lot of us don’t have a sense of roots. We’re floating,” he rightly observes. “It wouldn’t be fair to say that I sit in this studio and feel perfectly at home, but I’m beginning to feel like there’s a lineage. I’m beginning to see it come together.”

Read More:

• 
  The Immortal Life of Holly Meade
• 
  “Beyond the Brick” Brings Maine-Made Art and Music to Life
• 
  Watercolor Painter Abe Goodale Traces His Roots on 700 Acre Island
• 
  Shifting Dynamics Through the Power of Theater
• 
  Shifting Sequences: 2022 Juried Artist Exhibition

The post Watercolor Painter Abe Goodale Traces His Roots on 700 Acre Island appeared first on The Maine Mag.

On the stage of the auditorium at Lewiston Middle School (LMS), seventh graders are becoming statues. A girl in a hoodie winds up a punch while a boy in another hoodie crouches, hands spread to cover his face. A girl in a headscarf cups her hands around her mouth as if calling for help. They are telling their middle-school stories with their bodies, and with each other.

The students are participating in a program led by Maine Inside Out (MIO), an organization with a long history of creating dramatic performances along with incarcerated people. In recent years the organization has been doing more work in the community, collaborating with formerly incarcerated people to share and process their experiences and advocate for change in the justice system. The LMS program is a new venture. “Middle school is where kids start to ask all the questions: they start saying, ‘What is it that I’m missing?’” says facilitator Adan Abdikadir, who attended LMS himself. “They’re not the way they were raised anymore; they’re their own person.” Noah Bragg, another facilitator, explains that the idea came from some of their incarcerated participants. “We heard many stories of people getting system-involved in middle school. They would say, ‘This is a point when life really changed. I wish I had Maine Inside Out then.’”

Middle schoolers can be a challenging audience, but Maine Inside Out is used to working through challenges. They recruited participants by performing a seven-minute scene during a school assembly in March. More than 70 students signed up, and from that pool LMS faculty selected a group of 26. “There was something about seeing this very simple but strong scene around a middle-school experience, knowing actors had created it themselves, that drew the students in,” says MIO cofounder Chiara Liberatore. “Whatever it is about our theater spoke to the students. They saw the scene once, and they still will refer back to it. What that says to me is that they want this format to tell their own stories, and to work through what they are experiencing together.”

Unlike most of the plays performed on school stages, Maine Inside Out productions don’t come with a script. They are created by the actors, through a process that encourages participants to seek not only the expression but also the root of their experiences. On the wall of MIO’s Lisbon Street office, a drawing of an iceberg on an oversized Post-it illustrates the group’s process. At the top are issues the students have identified in their school: bullying, bystander behavior, targeting, snitching, and so on. Below the surface of the water are two more layers: the structures that create the patterns and, at the bottom of the iceberg, the beliefs—sometimes unrecognized, often complex—from which the problems grow.

Working through those layers with seventh graders isn’t easy, says Liberatore, but with continuous, gentle encouragement, they eventually deepen their thinking. The LMS students describe structures ranging from xenophobia and poverty to teenage hormones, resting on beliefs that include “fear of standing up,” powerlessness, homophobia, and the concept that some people are “bad apples.” All of this informs the creation of their early June performance—itself the small tip of a much larger process full of experimentation, practice, and reflection.

Twice a week, for an hour at a time, five facilitators—Abdikadir, Bragg, Liberatore, Tyler Jackson, and Darryl Shepherd, Jr.—divide themselves between two groups of students, working on scenes to be performed for parents and friends. There’s lots of creativity, but progress is slow. A few weeks before the performance date, the show hasn’t yet cohered. The students come up with scenes, but instead of building on them in subsequent sessions, they tend to drop their former ideas and start over. And not everyone stays involved. A student refuses to put away his (prohibited) phone, and a teacher is called in. “There’s a long list of students who wanted to get into this program,” she tells him. “You need to decide. Do you want to be here, or do you not want to be here?” He chooses to leave, and she escorts him out of the room. The facilitators regroup the rest of the students and keep working until the end of the period.

Back in their Lisbon Street headquarters, the group settles in to share highs and lows of the day. The incident with the student on his phone is troubling Bragg. It had been a hard moment, but afterward the students had done better work. For the first time, a student had returned to a previous scene, exclaiming, “I know what happens next!” Bragg and Abdikadir make a plan to follow up with the student who left the group (he would later return, freshly committed to the performance). The conversation continues to a discussion of structure and freedom: how can the facilitators provide enough of a “container” to help students stay focused while leaving space for them to make their own choices?

This is an important problem for an organization with freedom at the root of its mission. The organization started small, when Liberatore moved to Maine and met Margot Fine and Tessy Seward, who shared Liberatore’s commitment to creating change in the prison system through the arts. Their first project together came to life in 2008, when they worked with residents at the Women’s Reentry Center in Bangor to create an original production. They were able to gain the necessary approvals to hold the performance off-site, at the University of Maine’s Black Box Theater, for an invited audience. “It was really solidifying for us as a team,” says Liberatore, and the three committed to growing the organization. At first they had no budget; they sought grants and fiscal sponsorships to cover snacks and travel. All three had other jobs and were new parents, so progress was slow but it continued. A contract with Long Creek Youth Development Center put youth programming at the center of their work for several years. In 2013 they held a series of events titled “Culture of Punishment: From Parenting to Prisons,” including an original work by seven residents of Long Creek. Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, was a keynote speaker. The events attracted press attention and accelerated the organization’s growth. In 2014 MIO was organized as a nonprofit, and in 2015 Liberatore, Fine, and Seward became its first employees. Today there are 12, 8 of which are people with a lived experience of incarceration.

MIO’s slow, determined growth has brought changes: more stability, more recognition, and an evolution of their message and mission. “As we grew, and the young people grew in their experience and their artistry, the message got a lot bolder,” says Liberatore. “When the participants reentered the community, they had more opportunities to share their experiences from prison, their traumas.” The group’s philosophy is rooted in what the Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal named the “theater of the oppressed,” in turn influenced by the methods of educator Paolo Freire. At the heart of this model is a shift from authoritarian power structures to collaborative understanding—from monologue to dialogue. “We’re creating theater to find out what communities need, for prisons not to exist,” explains Bragg. “We’re using theater to balance out power dynamics, so we can have a real conversation about how to change those structures.”

MIO’s mission now incorporates work both inside and outside of prison communities. The group facilitates projects in which people can work through their experiences with incarceration while sharing those experiences with the larger public. This summer, they launched a new project inside Mountain View Correctional Facility in Penobscot County, and have begun the process of creation and reflection that will build into a new performance over several months. In the fall they will begin hosting public events at their recently opened Lewiston community site. And they’ll be returning to LMS to continue working with the same students as they move into eighth grade. “I have a vision that we will be in every prison in Maine, and some jails, some group homes,” says Liberatore. “Our vision is to be in the communities where the most people have been impacted by incarceration: Lewiston, Waterville, Biddeford, Portland. We want to have teams of facilitators who are from those communities.”

Many people who spend time with the prison system—whether as residents, employees, or interested citizens—find hope hard to maintain. To continue to work for change over years and through difficulties takes patience, care, and an unshakeable belief in humanity. “I want people to feel in their hearts how we’re all impacted if someone’s incarcerated,” says Liberatore. “Unless you’ve been incarcerated yourself, or spent time with someone who has been, you don’t really know how that feels. Being touched by an artwork can give people a way to share in that experience. Maybe it’s a little cliché, but no one is free until we are all free. I want people to feel that in their body and their heart, so that they will join a movement to change things. It won’t work if it’s just some of us. We need everybody.”

READ MORE:

• 
  Claiming Space at the Table
• 
  How to Go Antiquing Like a Mainer
• 
  Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State
• 
  Milkweed Man
• 
  A Stitch in Time

The post Shifting Dynamics Through the Power of Theater appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Meet the Judges

HILARY IRONS, Maine magazine’s arts columnist, is a painter and curator living and working in Portland. She is the gallery and exhibitions director at the University of New England and a cofounder of Able Baker Contemporary in Portland’s Arts District as well as an educator teaching at the Maine College of Art and Design and Bowdoin College.

ANJULI LEBOWITZ came from the National Gallery of Art in D.C. to become the inaugural Judy Glickman Lauder Associate Curator of Photography at the Portland Museum of Art. As a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art she curated Faith and Photography: Auguste Salzmann in the Holy Land. Her interests include photographic albums, feminist and Black counter narratives, and cross-cultural artistic networks.

TIMOTHY PETERSON has served as executive director and chief curator for the Center for Maine Contemporary Art since January 2021. He is also an active advocate for artists, contemporary art, audience engagement, equity, access, and transparency. He has curated over 150 exhibitions to-date with artists including solo exhibitions by Ryan Adams, Nicola López, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Nari Ward, Ghada Amer, Chris Doyle, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Njikdeka Akunyili Crosby, Ghada Amer, and Kehinde Wiley.

SAMANTHA BUTLER is an arts organizer and multidisciplinary artist based out of Biddeford. In 2021 she joined TEMPOart as the organization’s manager and has led the program through its 2022 public art commission. This September, she will step into the role of program manager at Surf Point Foundation, a nationally acclaimed artist residency in York. Butler has a rich history of developing engaging, artist-centric programming, especially supporting emerging artists.

Amy Brnger

As long as I have painted, I have been influenced by seasons as well as my emotional state while working. My approach to a bouquet, a landscape, or an interior will be different depending upon weather, the quality of light, whether I am tired and crabby or energized and happy. All are reflected in the final image. The way I push paint around a panel, feel the paint on my palette knife and brush, is dependent upon my feeling state and the current season. I try hard to keep the surprises that make their way onto a panel and stop the painting a few steps before it is finished. Sometimes the image might look awkward and slightly underdone, but if it feels genuine and somehow a reflection of how I see the world in that particular moment, then I want to keep it. When I keep working past that point, the likelihood of scraping the response away, or having an overworked image, is great. Throughout the pandemic I have often felt worried, sometimes sad, and often anxious, yet I continue to see beauty in our world. As you look at my flowers and interiors in January, birds and blooms in May, reflections of my studio and hot bright roofs in August, and the somber light of fall landscapes and end-of-season blooms, I hope you can catch a glimpse of the world as I see it.

Brian Smith

I am a sculptor interested in philosophies of queer ecology and humankind’s relation to nature. My content translates a yearning to reconnect with the natural world and make sense of it through the language of reflection, desire, and awe. My work intrigues yet confounds the viewer, evoking ripples of curiosity that invite them to consider their own relation to the natural world. I interpret nature through the queer lens, meaning “strange, odd, different,” while also utilizing tropes of queerness like campiness, sexuality, subversion, and counterculture. I work in a variety of materials, all centering sculpture as the manifestation of the themes I explore in which I offer a queer approach to a conjured, more collaborative future.

Eugene Cole

The working title for this project is Wetplate Seascapes. All the images are silver gelatin contact prints made from wet plate collodion negatives. I work with traditional and historical photographic processes ranging from 35mm film to mammoth 20- by 24-inch glass plate negatives. The bulk of my subject matter explores the juxtaposition and interaction of the land and sea.

Edward Duffy

I have always been compelled to draw. I would draw on my desk at school, on friends’ clothes, in the dirt, and everywhere else I was and wasn’t supposed to. I also love to look and listen to as much as I can, to try and make sense of things and to find importance. I like my work to have a childlike, surreal style that simplifies and amplifies the subject. Through my work I explore my own experience with the world around me, and I hope to make art more accessible and mainstream through digital ownership and universal display.

Elyse Grams

I mine the complicated and intertwined histories of ceramics and womanhood and their symbolic associations with refinement and “good taste.” My sloppy, anthropomorphic mimics of antique Wedgwood vases flaunt their costumed veneers of popular blue and white China patterns as they get dressed. Drawing from the historical canon of ceramics, the foundations of American morality, and the metaphor of “putting on a face,” and working in clay, cloth, and thread, I weave materials and histories of domestic life to name, dissect, and condemn the ways that white feminism benefits from and ultimately upholds white supremacy. I received my BFA in ceramics from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2017 and my MFA in studio art from MECA&D in 2020. I live and work in Portland.

Holden Willard

My work primarily deals with the figure and its interaction within space; my studies with observation are concerned with how my sight ultimately affects the work. I consider the ebb and flow that comes with every medium’s process, determining the best way to push my understanding of it. When I approach a piece, I am mainly looking to understand and re-evaluate choices. The work is always in flux with no particular attention to certain parts; rather, an awareness is placed upon the whole picture. The paintings build an attention to the surface; its history and change is analogous to how I perceive people, as perception is a consistent struggle. Whether I approach the figure or objects—the space in which they inhabit—I treat them with the same respect and attention. I consider how light translates to color. I try to interpret the heat that the body gives off, especially how that color can wash into the surrounding space and say something about the person.

Ian Trask

I am a scientist-turned-artist who received my degree in biology from Bowdoin College in 2005. After working for many years in the science field, I eventually changed directions to pursue a career in fine
art. While transitioning away from the science lab, I got a job as a hospital groundskeeper cleaning up garbage, an experience that proved to be formative in my artistic development. I learned to see the potential in refuse materials and gradually built a creative practice that draws inspiration from the waste stemming around me. I choose to create from things that are either discarded or donated by others in the deliberate effort to let community and access dictate the direction of my work.

Jessica Parker Foley

I make spooky landscape paintings populated with a cast of faceless characters. My works are derived from studies and sketches of coastal Maine, which becomes the setting for fantasy. My oil paintings are characterized by saturated, optical color work, an expansive vocabulary of mark-making, and lanky, ambling figures. By blending the historied Maine traditions of horror and landscape, I create scenes in which the body is a force within nature. The scenes range from moments of peril—passive subjects being touched, grabbed, and stepped on—to moments of force, where subjects are striking, lifting, and strangling. The faceless bodies contribute to the open narrative structure of the work—the lack of expression allows the figures to coolly disassociate from the proceeding activities. Self-possessed and self-aware, the paintings themselves gaze back toward the viewer.

Joyce Ellen Weinstein

I am primarily a figurative painter. My interest has always been in people: who they are, how they behave, and what they look like. However, after my recent relocation to Maine from New York City, the majestic beauty of Maine, its landscape and coastline, overwhelmed me. Viewing and living within this beauty opened a new world for me. I couldn’t help myself and produced a series of seascape and coastline paintings and prints observing the amazing beauty and overwhelming experience of being in raw nature. Now my goal is to incorporate my love of figures and the love of nature into the work.

Julia Arredondo

I have just exited an intense period of creating a new body of work that explores magic, objects, and mediumship heavily inspired by botánica culture and the syncretic spirituality of South Texas. Although I previously identified as artist entrepreneur, this new work focuses more on the similarities of visual language in spaces of retail and worship. Visual merchandising and altar building share similarities in creating space to invoke desire or wish fulfillment through object placement. By indulging in the nostalgic and problematic descriptor of Americana, I explore the historical crossroads of where manufacturing and magic meet to further survey the history of selling empowerment in the United States.

Karen Olson

When trees converse, the air is charged with chemical substances, fragrances, hormones, and electrical connections. Placing myself in the middle of the conversation, I am illuminated by it. I am keenly interested in this human–nature connection and how it supports and fosters mental health and interpersonal communication. It has become the subject of my latest projects. My work is concept-driven and lens-based, exploring subjects such as grief, trauma, empathy, and forest bathing. The act of constructing, deconstructing, and constructing further with both physical materials and digital files imitates the natural cycles of growth and decay. Elements are digitally captured, blended, and intertwined. Fibers, papers, and photographs are formed and sculpted, adding weight and texture. Creatively, I seek an open dialog with the materials and the subject, encouraging collaboration and interchange.

Kathy Weinberg

My work combines vignettes of daily life, times of day, patterns, historic and vintage scenes, still life, and allegory evoking a graphic novel, book of hours, journal, encyclopedia, storyboard, a poem, a calendar, or a memory. I use a pictorial language where image intersects with design to create open-ended narratives with singular images or groups of images resembling a scene on a stage, a movie still, or a train of thought. Practical objects are paired with ornamental flourishes, and the ordinary becomes mysterious.

Katia Dermott

I grew up in rural Maine. Homeschooled on a farm, barefoot and dust laden. Surrounded by the land and a rotating crew of seasonal workers, I learned to thrive on my imagination. The ability to see beyond the smallest occurrences of daily life has always been a necessity. Photography is both a tool of sight and a means of fiction. It exists so near reality that it sometimes feels more honest than the subject from which it is derived. Photography allows me to curate and condense information, expressing complexities that are often beyond the scope of a single moment. Fallen Branches Weigh More Than the Trees is a series about womanhood, place, and changing identity within the rural Maine landscape. I look at points of healing as they present on and beneath the surface of both people and land. Fallen Branches Weigh More Than the Trees speaks to fragility, the shedding of weight, the weight of what has shed, and the strength of continuing to stand amid what has been lost.

Kevin Xiques

My work is a representation of my escape from the metaphorical box I spent my childhood in. I grew up in a rural town in Vermont as one of the only people of color. I was frequently singled out for being one of the few Black people in my school and was known for being “slower” because of my dyslexia and slow processing speed. It was extremely difficult for my mind to follow conventional methods of learning, and I struggled in educational settings that demanded a standardized approach. My art is the liberation of my mind. I am allowing myself to embrace my own way of processing things and to forget about any normalcy I “should be” taking part in. There is no planning behind any of my pieces, only guidance from my present emotions. I make each mark as an intuitive response to the relative state of the canvas. This process is my therapy and a commitment to honoring my mind and the way it thinks.

Larry Clifford

My vibrant Biblioquilt series was created using old, discarded books that were salvaged from Maine libraries. They’re not made of cloth. I repurpose every part of the books—the covers, the pages, the spines—breathing new life into my materials with the addition of dyes, inks, and acrylics. After earning a BA in art from Northwestern University and an MA in biomedical communications from the University of Texas, I spent 15 years producing award-winning biomedical illustrations, with an emphasis on traditional media like pen-and-ink, carbon dust, and watercolor. At this stage of my career, I am thrilled to be getting back to my roots as a maker of fine art. The online gallery that I launched in March features original works, limited-edition giclee prints, and posters.

Nate Luce

My recent work deals with the difficulty of living a moral life in the modern world. Visual art is just one strand in the big skein of yarn—recorded music, performance, academic writing, and social practice are all interwoven. The larger project is to create a community of like-minded folks who think more ethically (even spiritually) as they navigate the wreckage of twenty-first-century America; but that is only in its early stages! For now, I’m just figuring out my own worldview, along with the most expedient means for communicating it. Along with painting, that currently is crewel embroidery, a folk art practice that both of my parents engaged in, along with my grandmother. I’m trying to negotiate with my Yankee heritage, while also working through a bit of psychological/ancestral baggage. The slightly earlier bead paintings are tied up with a more academic/philosophical investigation into how to maintain ritual practices both personally and in society at large.

Richard Huck

I am a realist at heart, yet over time I found that needed further exploration. I let the real world act as a catalyst for deeper and more playful thought. My work portrays this thinking.
The environment is a work of art that opens infinite worlds of discovery. I enjoy pursuing various avenues of creative thought, and although drawing mediums are by far my passion, I am not locked into that alone. I enjoy photography, sculpture, and painting as well. The subjects that I explore are familiar, with an emphasis on the mechanical, nature in all its forms, and the underwater realm. I will alter and extend them to bring the viewer closer to the unexpected.

Tabitha Barnard

I was raised, the oldest of four sisters, in a close-knit family in midcoast Maine. On one birthday I was gifted a film camera. Once I had my own camera, the photo shoots never stopped. Now, I have been photographing my family for the past ten years. In my most recent body of work, I examine the ever-changing and growing relationship between my family. Through my photographs, we learn to understand each other better through theatrical and fantastical image-making. As our childhood home, Maine exists as the backdrop for almost every image I make. As young children, we explored the woods behind our home and swam in quarries. Fort Baldwin was transformed into Rapunzel’s tower. Now as adults we revisit these locations from our childhood and experience the same magic. Through both staged and documentary photographs, I begin to tell the stories I’ve created with my family over the past few years and the history behind them.

Read More:

• 
  The Immortal Life of Holly Meade
• 
  “Beyond the Brick” Brings Maine-Made Art and Music to Life
• 
  Watercolor Painter Abe Goodale Traces His Roots on 700 Acre Island
• 
  Shifting Dynamics Through the Power of Theater
• 
  Shifting Sequences: 2022 Juried Artist Exhibition

The post Shifting Sequences: 2022 Juried Artist Exhibition appeared first on The Maine Mag.

“When I was in middle school, I was playing a game, and I had the realization that making games was someone’s job,” says Adam deGrandis, who is sipping coffee on his back porch in Scarborough one clear spring morning. “That blew me away. And a second later I thought, Oh my god— that could be my job!” The year was 1995, and the game was Command and Conquer (which might bring up some memories for the elder millennials and gen-Xers out there). It would be a decade before deGrandis would get his foot in the door of the then-fledgling indie gaming industry, but that realization stuck with him, propelling him along what, by his own account, was no easy path. “Learning how to make games is hard,” deGrandis admits. “Doing it blind,” with little to no help, “is incredibly hard.”

In the early 2000s deGrandis attended the Maine College of Art (MECA—now Maine College of Art and Design, MECA&D) for graphic design. He realized that, although the college did not yet have any courses in game design, the computers all had a 3D-modeling software program called Maya installed. “I was aware [Maya] was used in games and in film, and I had access to it. I would basically skip classes to teach myself Maya,” he recalls. Serendipitous as this opportunity may seem, it points to a larger pattern in deGrandis’s early years: striving to realize his goal while taking advantage of the scant resources available. These were the days of dial-up internet and sluggish Yahoo searches. The lack of easily available information led deGrandis to take an all-or-nothing approach. “I came to the conclusion that if you work in games you have to be able to do everything. That’s not really the case. Most people specialize, but I didn’t know that.”

And so deGrandis taught himself everything, from design to modeling, programming, and digital art creation. In 2005 he got an internship at the early indie studio GarageGames and moved to Eugene, Oregon. DeGrandis bounced around the country following work until 2011, when he decided to move back to Portland. At the time, it seemed an odd choice for someone with his aspirations. “My wife, Sarah, and I moved back primarily because it’s a very high quality of life here. We love the environment, we love the people,” deGrandis says. But he admits that there wasn’t much of a video game development scene in Maine. Even so, with the connections he’d made on the West Coast, he managed to get by with freelance gigs and adjunct work at his alma mater. Then he founded Chickadee Games in 2014.

“Portland, and Maine in general, has such a rich history of artists of all stripes coming here. It took a little while, but I think digital art is now taking root the same way, especially games. Other people come here and say, ‘This feels like home,’ and they want to stay. It’s like, ‘Oh cool, because those are my people.’ The community just builds.”

These days, deGrandis thinks of himself primarily as an art director for hire. “That’s the short version,” he laughs. Using the art fundamentals he built at MECA, coupled with everything he’s learned about game creation since, he helps companies across the globe realize their games’ unique artistic visions from his home office in Scarborough. “I’ll start with a bunch of different questions; it’s a lot of listening. I’m trying to find out what the game is about. And I try to remove myself from that process as much as possible. I don’t want to make Adam’s version of their idea; I want to make their idea.”

DeGrandis takes this separation of self from work seriously. Although he still begins most of his projects with hand-drawn sketches, often creating unique playlists to get himself into the right headspace, he doesn’t necessarily consider what he does to be art in the strictest sense. “For most of my career I have approached my job more as a craftsman,” he explains. “An artist has questions they want to ask a viewer or audience, and they have something they want to say. A craftsman doesn’t have anything of their own they want to say, but they’re really interested in language, and they like wrestling with language.”

In deGrandis’s craft, he wrestles with what he calls the Triad of Concerns: visual communication, marketing, and production. The goal of visual communication is for gamers to be able to understand their characters’ motivation, obstacles, and rewards in “the five-second read,” which is what he calls looking at a screenshot of the game for just five seconds. This has to be balanced with both marketability—making sure the game looks good and appeals to gamers—and production—being mindful that it doesn’t take forever to create. “As I’m designing an art style, I’m weighing all these things. Every decision is deliberate.”

DeGrandis has been the art director on hit indie games such as Tooth and Tail, Steambirds Alliance, and Battle Bands, the last of which is from the local Portland developer Aerie Digital. Currently he’s working on revisioning the art style of Desktop Dungeons, an award-winning quickplay puzzle game. (A more inclusive list of his work can be found at chickadeegames.com.) And, for those looking to learn, he’s landed a job teaching his craft as a full-time educator at MECA&D, beginning this fall.

For inspiration, deGrandis looks to his surroundings. “Walking the trails all around the marsh here, that’s where I feel my temperature come down. Or even just going out to the ocean and looking at the expanse of it and feeling small. This is where I want to be. This is home.”

Read More:

• 
  The Immortal Life of Holly Meade
• 
  “Beyond the Brick” Brings Maine-Made Art and Music to Life
• 
  Watercolor Painter Abe Goodale Traces His Roots on 700 Acre Island
• 
  Shifting Dynamics Through the Power of Theater
• 
  Shifting Sequences: 2022 Juried Artist Exhibition

The post A Maine Video Game Designer Levels Up appeared first on The Maine Mag.

To the average music listener, the genres of rock, folk, and jazz seem like entirely separate entities, delineated into distinct boxes within the music industry. To those with more attuned ears, similarities among the three blur the lines ever so slightly. For Portland-based musician and activist Mali Obomsawin, who specializes in these genres in her work as a composer, songwriter, bass player, singer, and bandleader, the three aren’t separate at all, but intertwine. “Jazz and folk and rock are a continuum,” she says, noting how folk and rock draw from gospel music traditions, which in turn draw from jazz and blues. “I hope, in my career, to exemplify that, if you dig deep enough into any of those genres, you’ll get to the others.”

Obomsawin’s debut album as a composer and bandleader, Sweet Tooth (slated for release this fall), is the embodiment of this sentiment of interwoven styles. Dubbed by Obomsawin as her “resistance suite,” the record draws on both her lifelong musical training and her Wabanaki heritage as a citizen of the Abenaki First Nation at Odanak, and it features her original compositions alongside ancient Wabanaki songs written by her ancestors. Known most widely for her work as the bass player for popular folk group Lula Wiles, for which she also writes and sings indie and Americana songs, Obomsawin’s album is a deviation into her other musical passions. “I think people don’t know that alongside Lula Wiles and in between our shows, I’ve always been developing this other craft of mine, which is jazz music,” she says. “Specifically, avant-garde and creative improvised music, which has an amazing legacy of being resistance music.”

Obomsawin was born in northern New Hampshire and moved to Farmington when she was five. She has spent much of her life imbued in music and the creative arts. Her childhood home in Farmington was a converted barn that had served as storage for Bread and Puppet Theater, and when the family moved in it still housed various papier-mâché mythical creatures, creating what Obomsawin describes as a “dreamy” environment to grow up in. From a young age she listened to her father, a jazz and blues musician, play at home and in venues around the Northeast and, in the fifth grade, when she started learning the upright bass, she began playing with him. She went on to join the Franklin County Fiddlers, a fiddle group based in Farmington, and in the summers attended Maine Jazz Camp and Maine Fiddle Camp, where she met her future bandmates from Lula Wiles, Isa Burke and Eleanor Buckland, when she was only 13.

In 2013 Obomsawin enrolled at Berklee College of Music to study upright bass, and that’s when she formed Lula Wiles with Burke and Buckland, who were already attending the prestigious Boston school. She then went on to study at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, majoring in comparative literature and government while simultaneously going through the college’s music program. As the youngest of the three members of Lula Wiles, Obomsawin was touring and recording with the group while still in school after her bandmates had already graduated, and most of her spare moments outside of class were spent honing her craft. After graduating in 2018 Obomsawin moved back to Boston and began touring with the band full-time, spending roughly one week of each month in her apartment. In late 2019 she moved to New York City, performing the same dance of life on the road for about six months before the pandemic hit in early 2020. The lockdown meant canceled shows and a dried-up source of income, which made paying New York City rent no longer feasible. So, she returned home to Maine.

For most of the pandemic Obomsawin was living in a cabin in Lubec, sequestered from the world. During quarantine Lula Wiles (aided by Zoom) wrote and recorded their latest album, Shame and Sedition, which came out in 2021 and, of the group’s three albums, most prominently features Obomsawin’s songwriting. After spending innumerable hours on the road for years—which Obomsawin describes as being hard on the body, mentally and physically, and hard on the earth from an emissions standpoint—the lockdown provided her with the opportunity to finally slow down and focus on her own work.

Under the tutelage of her mentor at Dartmouth, Taylor Ho Bynam, Obomsawin had begun composing what would eventually become Sweet Tooth during her senior year. Inspired by her musical inheritance as a Wabanaki, Obomsawin found herself reflecting on the adaptiveness of Indigenous people. “There is this kind of expectation that Native people won’t evolve,” she says, “that people will only take you seriously as a Native person if you are dressed like it’s 1730, and you’re wearing your full regalia. But we are adaptive, and our music traditions reflect that as well.” Many of the songs on the album give a nod to the musical influences in the Northeast that her ancestors were exposed to, including jazz, ragtime, and brass marching bands. She notes one song in particular, written by one of her ancestors some 150 years ago, that has clear influences from Quebecois waltzes. In turn, the album also pays tribute to the musical influences Obomsawin grew up listening to, including jazz, folk, and rock and roll, in addition to the ancient songs she and her relatives would sing together.

In the past few years, Obomsawin has also branched out into composing for various outside projects, including writing the score for We Are the Warriors, a documentary about the removal of racist mascots from the Wells-Ogunquit school district, as well as string arrangements for musician-led Portland string ensemble Palaver Strings’ project Welcome Here, which celebrates the indigenous and immigrant communities in Maine. In 2020 she joined Welcome to Indian Country, a roundup of Native musicians that travels across Turtle Island (a common Indigenous name synonymous with North America) performing for audiences Obomsawin says she rarely found while touring with Lula Wiles. “I struggled a lot with trying to get Native people and people of color in general to come out to our shows, because it doesn’t exactly scream ‘relatability’ to a lot of those audiences.” With Welcome to Indian Country, that representation is completely shifted. “I think that, if I had grown up seeing Native people play rock and roll and seeing Native artists play jazz,” she says, “I would have understood our place in that music a lot sooner.”

On top of her music, Obomsawin writes and organizes for Sunlight Media, a media team that documents and promotes stories at the intersection of tribal sovereignty and environmental justice in the Wabanaki Homeland. She also cofounded the Bomazeen Land Trust, a nonprofit focused on landback initiatives in Maine that has successfully returned land in the Kennebec River region to the Wabanaki Confederacy.

For the rest of 2022, Obomsawin, who now lives in Portland, has a busy tour schedule planned. This month she will be traveling in Maine and the Northeast with her rock band, performing her own songs under her own name for the first time. Sweet Tooth, performed and recorded by the Mali Obomsawin Sextet (which is different from the group she is touring with now), “ends with a chant that I wrote with my partner and with a grandmother named Carol Dana, from Penobscot Nation,” says Obomsawin. “The words of the chant say, ‘I stand to fight him, I stand to face him. We remember our matriarchs and we honor our grandmothers.’” Much like the music she performs and writes, in many ways Obomsawin is a continuum of her own. “I think that Native people are resistant all the time.” she says. “There’s the common phrase that people say, ‘our existence is resistance,’ because this nation was founded on the idea that Native people will soon be extinct because the genocide will be complete. When we exist, when we thrive, and when we declare our presence, that is a resistance.”

Read More:

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  Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State
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  Milkweed Man
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  A Stitch in Time

The post A Maine Musician Taps into Her Roots appeared first on The Maine Mag.

The first time Hanji Chang’s animation work went viral, she was a student in the new media program at Maine College of Art in 2012. In the video, titled “Meat Recall,” Chang animated her husband Andy O’Brien’s comic about working in a Hannaford call center. The under-two minute clip features a chaotic, enthusiastic, and foul-mouthed exchange between a call center employee and an East Millinocket resident with a thick Maine accent, both voiced by O’Brien. The video struck a chord with Maine audiences unaccustomed to seeing something so authentic to their state depicted in a cartoon. From the character’s New England Patriots beanie and flannel shirt to the fridge full of Geary beer and Twisted Tea, Chang and O’Brien captured a working-class Mainer stereotype that felt reverential and real.

Thus began the popular, decidedly not-safe-for-work Temp Tales web series animated by Chang and written by O’Brien. Created under the stitched-together name O’Chang Comics, the series follows 30-something Atom O’Chang (voiced by O’Brien) as he works a series of odd jobs along Maine’s coast. With the tagline “by Mainers, for Mainers,” Temp Tales was inspired by the couple’s experiences working various short-term jobs after the Great Recession and introduces viewers to a cast of characters loosely based off real Mainers that the couple met along the way. “We always have this undertone of a class struggle and the idea of big corporations and rich people versus working people [in Temp Tales], because that’s the background that we came from,” says Chang, who has done everything from painting houses to yard work alongside O’Brien, who now works for the Maine AFL-CIO labor union federation. “Labor and class are something that we are passionate about.”

Chang and O’Brien met in Taiwan and moved to his home state of Maine in 2007. The couple settled into life in Portland, where Chang says she was met with interactions that made her feel like she didn’t belong, including people mispronouncing her name and incorrectly saying she was from China or Thailand. She started to turn these anecdotes into comics. In one, she and O’Brien are referred to as John and Yoko in a series of scenes around Portland. In another, when she gets pulled over for driving erratically, it’s chocked up to “cultural differences.”

Chang is used to being viewed as an outsider. Born and raised in Taiwan to a Korean mother and Taiwanese father, as a child her Korean lineage often set her apart from her peers. Her name, Hanji, is actually a nickname meaning “Korean chick” in Chinese, which she finds is easier for people in America to pronounce than her real name, Chen Hua. When she was four years old, her family moved to South Africa during the end of apartheid, and she was the only child of Asian descent at her elementary school. Once they returned to Taiwan five years later, she had to be held back in school because she needed to relearn Chinese. “I feel like my entire life I’ve just been trying to fit in and adapt,” says Chang.

When Chang and O’Brien used to attend comic conventions and meet-and-greets around the state for Temp Tales, some fans seemed to be let down when they discovered who was behind the screen, Chang says. “I feel like they’re kind of disappointed when they meet us because they were probably expecting big, hairy dudes, and then they see me, an Asian woman, drawing them.” Despite those negative interactions, her work on Temp Tales has made her feel more accepted and a greater sense of belonging in the state. “I feel like I’ve done something for Maine, and I want to be considered a Mainer,” she says.

Although Temp Tales are her most widely recognized animations, Chang, who lives in Rockland and works remotely as an animation instructor at Maine College of Art and Design, has expanded into environmental public service announcements and children’s music videos. While finishing her degree in 2014, instead of writing a final essay for a marine biology class, she created a video called “Attack of the Green Crabs” about the invasive crustacean’s population in Maine. “I thought, there have to be a lot of people like me who care about this but aren’t scientific brain types and would like something that’s easier to digest,” says Chang. “So, I thought, maybe I’ll just use what I know how to do and write my essay through animation.”

The video gained attention from environmental groups, including the Maine Sea Grant Program, which commissioned Chang to create a two-part series titled “A Climate Calamity in the Gulf of Maine.” Drawn in a similar style to Temp Tales, the environmental PSAs were met with opposition from some fans of the web series, who told Chang and O’Brien to stick to humorous videos. However, Chang feels strongly that using animation makes environmental issues more accessible. “Even if [viewers] don’t agree with me and even if they don’t get it, at the very least they are entertained by it.” More recently the duo, under their animation studio Puckerbrush Animations, partnered with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to create a video about Maine’s endangered Atlantic salmon population and are currently working on a video focusing on sturgeon.

Moving forward, Chang is excited to tell new stories. When Temp Tales took off, numerous storylines she wanted to explore on the O’Chang Comics channel took a backseat. Now that Chang and O’Brien are getting close to wrapping up the Temp Tales’ “Great Lost Strain” storyline (which follows a search for a mystical marijuana strain growing somewhere on a Maine island), they’re planning out new ventures focused on New England history, such as a story about Maine mill workers going on strike and the history of how the idea of witches came about. Fans of the web series needn’t worry, though. “We’re still going to do Temp Tales,” Chang says. Regardless of what the videos are about, you can count on them continuing to champion the working class with plenty of humor.

Read More:

• 
  The Immortal Life of Holly Meade
• 
  “Beyond the Brick” Brings Maine-Made Art and Music to Life
• 
  Watercolor Painter Abe Goodale Traces His Roots on 700 Acre Island
• 
  Shifting Dynamics Through the Power of Theater

The post The Animator Documenting Maine’s Changing Landscape appeared first on The Maine Mag.

After 11 years of making music and touring across the country and world, the Ghost of Paul Revere announced in April that the band would be breaking up after its summer tour. The Maine-based folk band got its start singing in Portland bars and went on to perform on Conan and had a song named as Maine’s official state ballad. The bandmates said in the Instagram post announcing the news that their two-day Ghostland festival on September 2 and 3 in Portland would be their last shows “for the sake of our own health, our families, and you, our fans.” Three of the four band members, Griffin Sherry, Sean McCarthy, and Max Davis, grew up together and graduated from Bonny Eagle High School in Standish. Charles Gagne joined in 2018 as the band’s drummer. We spoke with three of the members shortly after they made the announcement.

How did you feel when the band made the decision to break up?

Sean McCarthy: Being a part of the band, there were certain things that I knew I would always have to have a reckoning with, whether it was time away from home or the way in which we tour. There’s always been a sense of inevitability that I can’t have my cake and eat it too. I can’t be home with my hopeful kids every weekend for their softball games and be a professional musician. But when the decision was made to do what we’re doing, it was kind of like two separate sides of the same coin. Is this the right decision now? All these coulda, shoulda, wouldas popped up. Trying to keep the confidence in the decision and knowing that it will be the best thing for us moving forward is something you have to follow up all those doubts with each time.

Charles Gagne: I was focused more on the importance of people looking out for what’s best for themselves and their health and their lives and their families, which is, at the sum of its parts, bigger than this band and ultimately more important. It’s life. I don’t know why my brain goes there, and maybe it’s a defense mechanism. But in the weeks following, the reality of it began setting in. We are talking about it like an open book. It’s an interesting thing to have a kind of public dismantling. That is something that I’m still kind of adjusting to and learning to deal with. The silver lining and the greatest thing is that we still for the rest of the summer get to go out and play. That’s the best medicine for me, personally.

Griffin Sherry: In accordance with any type of loss, you do go through the stages of grief. I think that with the exception of maybe disbelief, I probably went through most of them in the first couple days. We spend a lot of time together, so to say the writing wasn’t on the walls would be kind of a lie. But any time you come to a crossroads in your life, there’s going to be some type of momentary hindsight, where you go, “If this had changed, maybe this could have persevered, or if we had done something differently here, maybe this would’ve been different.” But at the end of the day hindsight is just a lesson to learn from for the future and not something that can change the present or the past. No matter how difficult it was, there’s another part of it that does have me excited about what comes next for us and what that means creatively for individuals and people’s lives. We are fortunate to be able to play until the end of summer and finish this out with a big bang at Ghostland. That’s going to be one of the few proper send-offs that we possibly could have given this kind of experiment that we’ve been doing.

How was it to play that first show in Waterville after the announcement?

SM: When the comments and all the heartfelt messages started coming in, I got a little nervous about how we’re going to continue to go through the rest of the summer shows because I was getting all choked up. Then when we had our first show and people were coming up to us, I was surprised at how not sad that was. It’s very hard to put into words. It felt like we were tying up loose ends in a way. When all these people were coming up to say goodbye, they’d always start out with something like, “Heard this terrible rumor, say it isn’t so.” But then the next sentence was always, “We’re so proud of you guys. We can’t wait to see what you do next. And thank you.” Every single time. That’s made it easier in a lot of ways. Harder in a lot of ways, but easier in a lot of ways, too.

CG: It was kind of like that Band-Aid that’s been on for a little too long and the hair starts growing into the glue. I think the Waterville night ripped that Band-Aid off, and it was a weird sense of relief. It’s relieving in the way that you don’t have to create in your head what it’s going to be like when you first have those interactions or how you’re going to react. I don’t want to say that we’re going to start getting more comfortable with that, but I think that we will, just because of how repetitive it’ll be. Every show is going to be potentially the last show we play in front of X or Y amount of people or at a certain venue, like that probably was the last show at the Waterville Opera House and at Higher Ground the next day in Burlington. Every one of them is going to have a whole lot of meaning.

GS: The amount of support and love we’ve received as a band has never been lost on me. It’s really incredible what we managed to grow over these years and how invested other people were in the music we were making. So, it is sad to know that there’s no repeats for the rest of the summer. Every time we hit a stage, it’ll be the last time we play on that stage as this band. The hope is that we can put on a performance at each of these shows that will be one that people won’t forget and is deserving of how much love and support we get. After all these years, every time I get up on stage, I still feel like I owe the crowd a lot.

What are you looking forward to in life after the band?

SM: I’m looking forward to being able to take a step back and see the forest for the trees a little bit more. Even though this job is expansive in a lot of ways, you can get hyper focused on it. For so many years now we’ve been making this our priority. So, the process of figuring out what comes next or, rather, how what comes next comes next is exciting.

GS: I’m really looking forward to something that’s totally new. I think that’s a very exciting prospect of this whole thing, moving forward with something that I can bring some of the lessons that I’ve learned and just move forward into the future. And just keep creating. That urge isn’t going to stop. I know I’m always going to want to write songs and perform them.

Is there anything in particular you’ll miss about the fans?

GS: I’ll just miss them. They are the reason for this, all of this. We had a little bit to do with it, but, honestly, it’s the people who have supported us all these years that truly made this thing into what it was and what it is. And we would be lost without them. I could never thank them enough in my entire life for what they’ve done for us.

SM: They’ve provided an opportunity of a lifetime, quite literally. You hear people say that phrase all the time and the weight of it always kind of goes over my head. But it really has been an opportunity of a lifetime, and it is all because of the fans. I feel very, very lucky.

Do you think you would ever get together for a reunion show?

GS: Never say never. The Bond movies taught me that.

CG: I think Elton John’s been on a farewell tour for like five years now.

GS: How many reunion shows has KISS done? Hundreds?

CG: Too many.

GS: Who knows? If it happens, it’ll be in the future. That’s for sure.

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The post The Ghost of Paul Revere Takes One Final Tour appeared first on The Maine Mag.

A few winters ago, photographer Gabe Bornstein decided on a whim to explore the mouth of the Nonesuch River in Scarborough’s Pine Point. He donned his hooded winter wetsuit, took his camera encased in a waterproof housing and paddled out on his eight-foot surfboard. “As a surfer and photographer particularly interested in immersing myself in the ocean and surrounding environments, the river opened up a new personal frontier and forced me to reorient the way I had been thinking about and perceiving the ocean for my entire life,” says Bornstein, who lives in Old Orchard Beach. He began capturing fishing boats moored in Saco Bay in the wintertime and discovered that being on the board gave him a different perspective on a scene he had often seen from shore. “The dings, grit, and scuffs on each boat are vivid, and the reflection of the boats and sky on the surface of the water results in a dreamy, mirror-like plane,” he says. Once he identifies a vessel he wants to photograph, he’ll paddle past it, then slide off the board into the water and let the tide draw him back to the position from which he wants to shoot. “It usually takes quite a few snaps of the shutter to nail focus and composition, which often means paddling back into position and having another go at it,” Bornstein says. “I’ll carry on like this until I start losing feeling in my fingers, at which point it’s time to head home.” With so many variables to contend with, it often takes around two hours to get a single, perfect shot. “My life and my photography revolve in great part around the coast of Maine and the oceans at large,” Bornstein says. “Exploring estuaries like this, where the Nonesuch River meets the Atlantic Ocean, scratches the constant itch I have to be in the water, while hopefully giving both Mainers and those from away a glimpse into one tiny sliver of the state.”

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The post Snapshots from a Surfboard appeared first on The Maine Mag.