July exhibitions at Caldbeck Gallery

July exhibitions at Caldbeck Gallery include work by Todd Watts, David Raymond, Bayard Hollins and Barbara Sullivan.

The shows run July 1 to 31, with an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. July 1. Caldbeck Gallery is at 12 Elm St., Rockland. For more information, email [email protected], go to www.caldbeck.com, or call 207-594-5935. 

Todd Watts: “Photographs”

“I make photographs. It is said that a photograph captures a moment in time, an event perhaps. That may be, but the source of this notion originates from the mechanical manifestations of cameras, lenses and film. People do not capture moments of time. How would we do that? Our personal experience of time is fluid. The events in our lives will not hold still. Some photographic records cascade memories and emotions. A wedding portrait, for example, is an icon that represents the events of the wedding day. Every person in attendance experiences the event filtered by their own histories; seeing the portrait, that is what comes to mind. Seeing the portrait at a later date, and then again much later, will evoke different memories, not because the picture, made in a moment, has changed but because the viewer has. Of course, this only pertains to the participants. For the rest of us, the picture is just another anonymous wedding portrait. Though, it remains an icon, it is an encounter of a different kind. My pictures do not capture moments. They are photographs, but they do not depict particular events. Grace Hartigan put it this way: ‘One of the most difficult things of all, is not to have the painting be a depiction of the event but the event itself.’ Her words are a well known mantra of contemporary art. … When I make my pictures, I speak to them, often out loud, and they whisper back. The work is completed when, as in any conversation, the subject changes. The conversation remains encapsulated in the work, to be continued by myself or by anyone else. After lunch perhaps, or during a long flight to Paris, or right now.” — Todd Watts

David Raymond: “New Work”

“My drawings emerged from my steel and stone sculpture. Like the sculptures, the drawings assemble forms as cohesive structures. The drawings are macrocosms, the broad shapes, populated by microcosms, the small often circular marks, all of which give function to the white field. The paper is a utopian, non-pictorial space, existing to be divided by and to support and contain the drawn forms that have no other real or imagined space. They are made to invite overall visual experience and specific close-in seeing.” — David Raymond

Bayard Hollins: “New Paintings”

“I try to let go of what a place looks like to get to how a place feels. Beyond the surface of things to that secret undercurrent that holds my imagination. These are paintings forged by memories. I want to strip it down to the core matter. A distillation that keeps me coming back for more.” — Bayard Hollins

Barbara Sullivan: “Chifforobe”

“The title came about from my re-reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ during the pandemic. In the book, the word chifforobe kept coming up — it is used well over 10 times! Growing up in Maine, we had a chifforobe in my brother’s room in our farmhouse, a holdover from earlier times, when houses had no closets. People hung their clothes in a wardrobe, or a chifforobe. The fresco work in this show refers to clothing which could be stored in a chifforobe. I love the sound of the word, as it carries the memory of my mother’s voice saying, ‘Chifforobe.’ The seeds of this body of work began in 2018, when I did a three-week residency in Ireland at The Tyrone Guthrie Center in County Monaghan. There, I made a series of tiny, shaped fresco shirts, whose texture reflected the tradition of Irish linens, assimilating me into the lush Irish culture known for that iconic cloth. I continued to investigate this work. In 2021, during my residency at the Ellis Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, Maine, I began creating what soon became a group of over 100 tiny fresco shirts. Last year, these were exhibited at the Ticonic Gallery, in Waterville. The work further evolved into life sized clothing, while I was a fellow at the The Surf Point Foundation in York, Maine, in February 2022. The Chifforobe piece seemed inevitable, as I had an entire wardrobe of clothing that needed a conceptual place to live. Making frescoes about objects that are usually put together and sewn by the human hand has made me realize how much sewing has informed my artwork. The complicated sequential steps and techniques, that are part of garment making, have taught me more about building bas-relief sculptural work than just about anything else. Constructing clothing from flat cloth into something that fits over the three-dimensional body becomes the perfect teacher of spatial relationships. As always, our approach to art making comes from what we already know.” — Barbara Sullivan