Visit Maine Museum of Photographic Arts’ new space during an opening reception from 5 to 8 p.m. May 5.
Cole Caswell and Carol Eisenberg are the featured artists from May 3 to June 25.
The exhibit showcases Cole Caswell’s multiple approaches to photography. The images on display include contemplative seascapes, studies of the sun and atmosphere, and detailed close-ups of collected spider webs and plants gathered from around the artist’s island studio. The processes employed to produce these pieces range from the 19th Century Wet Plate Collodion process, large-scale cyanotypes produced in nature, and even photograms created by detonating explosive material in close proximity to photographic paper. Through these varied processes and experiments, Caswell engages with remnants and patterns in our landscape and environment that reflect contemporary strategies of civilization and our ability to survive.
For the past decade, Caswell has been living and working nomadically throughout the country, exploring man’s ability to subsist and create within our contemporary environment. Whether on the road or in his studio on Peaks Island, he continues his research and exploration into emergent and experimental photographic techniques, perspectives, and applications. The Event Horizon exhibition revels in these experimentations and questions how we perceive the modern landscape and our relationship to it. It is an accumulation of Caswell’s observations on the shifting nature of reality.
Carol Eisenberg has been a practicing photographer since the 1990s. She specializes in creating digitally constructed images from originally sourced photographs she shoots in the studio and on location in Maine and Israel, where she resides, as well as on her extensive travels here and abroad. Eisenberg’s work has been featured in Décor Maine, Maine Art Journal, Portland Press Herald and Lenscratch, among others. In 2020, her work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Maine Jewish Museum, Portland, and Carver Hill Gallery, Camden. Her work is in both public and private collections nationwide.
“I create constructed digital images that blur the line between painting and photography,” Eisenberg says. “This duality of aesthetics is an essential component of my approach to art and life. I am drawn to the polarities of beauty and decay, the contrived and the natural, the excessive and the elegant. All of my compositions begin with originally sourced imagery selected from photographs I shoot in my studio or on location in mid-coast Maine where I live half the year or my neighborhood and surroundings in Tel Aviv, Israel, where I reside the other half, as well as on my extensive travels here and abroad. As an active participant in the feminist movement in the 1970s, the principles of inclusion, equality and justice underlie my work in the breadth of source material and the embrace of beauty in all its forms.”
View the work at www.mainemuseumofphotographicarts.org/eisenberg-caswell.
Maine Museum of Photographic Arts is at 15 Middle St., 3A, Portland. Learn more at MaineMuseumofPhotographicArts.org.
Categories: Artists Reception, exhibitions, gallery, openings, Portland, shows
