Sara Stites, “June and Tower.”

In response to COVID-19 stay-at-home orders and local closings, the Maine Museum of Photographic Arts in Portland began creating the online series MMPA Antidote, which includes photographic artwork, audio interviews, and artist statements and reflections from Maine artists, aimed to serve as inspiration during times of isolation.

A new issue of MMPA Antidote is available online at www.mainemuseumofphotographicarts.org.

Work by Sara Stites is featured in this issue.

“My work has always had an organic, visceral aspect which I consider to be part of my concern with life issues, like vulnerability, passion and the uncanny,” she writes. “Much of it explores a paradox; sensitivity to deeply guarded inner stories coexists with a satiric playfulness, exploring the pathetic and the comic. Using mostly functional objects from the studio, I have been building precarious, tentative ‘sculptures’ in front of drawings and paintings that contain figurative elements as well as marks and erasures. These sculptural objects mimic, in 3D, the hue and form articulated in the drawing. Manipulation of the light source and shadows further a process of refinement and integration, particularly when the result has been photographed as the final “artifact” of the process. Objects, like a careful drawing, become democratized when considered within my photos where other materials are placed alongside the drawing. I celebrate the studio through the use of detritus, whatever is at hand, waiting to be repurposed in the photograph. The imagery becomes a melding of abstraction and representation, always considering gravity, air and light.”

Investigate the links, share the images, and send some of your own to contact.mmpa@gmail.com.