Dowling Walsh Gallery Opens 2026 Season with Solo Exhibitions by Artists Lauren Fensterstock and Jacob Bond Hessle

Lauren Fensterstock, I Arrange the Stars, Vintage crystal, glass, quartz, obsidian, tourmaline and mixed media.

Dowling Walsh Gallery will open its 2026 season with solo exhibitions by artists Lauren Fensterstock and Jacob Bond Hessler. Both exhibitions will be on view through June 27, 2026. The public is invited to attend a reception for the artists on Saturday,  May 23, from 4 to 6 pm. Now in its nineteenth year, Dowling Walsh Gallery, located at 357 Main Street in Rockland, specializes in art by leading and emerging artists, especially those with connections to Maine.

Lauren Fensterstock: In Each and Every (May 22– June 27, 2024)

In her first exhibition with Dowling Walsh Gallery, Lauren Fensterstock: In Each and Everypresents recent sculptures and works on paper by the Portland, Maine-based artist. Known for her elaborate sculptures and installations that bind our physical and metaphysical landscapes. Fensterstock says, “I am not chasing a transcendence that rises above, but an immanence that resides within, here in the stuff of this earth.” Extravagant in their material presence and devotional labor, her works command the eye to the present moment, bringing attention to embodied experience.

Encrusted with crystals, faceted glass, shells, and semi-precious stones, Fensterstock’s tabletop and wall-hung sculptures absorb and reflect light, suggesting jeweled meteors, lotus blossoms, grottos, and mysterious terrestrial forms. Accompanying the sculptures is a group of works on paper, and a series of ink and crystal-embellished drawings she created at Civitella Ranieri, an artist residency in a 15th-century castle in Umbertide, Italy. Collectively titled “Amrita,” a Sanskrit term for “immortality,” referring to the “nectar of the gods” or “ambrosia,” these exquisitely rendered abstract images radiate energy and connection, serving as a diary of Fensterstock’s stay.

Lauren Fensterstock received her BFA from the Parsons School of Design and MFA from SUNY New Paltz. Her work has been shown internationally, including at The Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Chrysler Museum of Art, Reykjavik Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow, John Michael Kohler Art Center, Rikswijk Museum, and Des Moines Art Center. She has been awarded grants from United States Artists, Groot Foundation, and Artist’s Resource Trust. She currently teaches in the Jewelry Department at the Rhode Island School of Design. Previously, she served as the Lamar Dodd Professional Chair at the University of Georgia, Academic Program Director of the Interdisciplinary MFA in Studio Arts at the Maine College of Art, and as Interim Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art.

 

 

Jacob Bond Hessler: Garden of Shadows (May 22– June 27, 2026)

Camden, Maine-based photographer Jacob Bond Hessler is known for his expansive and meditative images of the natural and built environments. In his latest series, Garden of Shadows, he turns his observant eye to the night landscape. “As of late, darkness is no longer an absence to me—it is a vessel,” he says. “In my work, I explore darkness as a living, necessary presence, the fertile ground in which light becomes meaningful. Without shadow, brightness flattens; without loss, renewal is hollow.”

Hessler’s photographs in Garden of Shadows treat darkness as both aesthetic and psychic space, “a place where pain, grief, and quietude coalesce and give rise to the fragile shoots of hope.” Deep tones and obscured forms invite close looking—slivers of light, delicate marks, and illuminated materials break through as gestures of renewal. The physicality of surface—rough, smooth, layered, aglow—recalls the mystery that soil holds and memory, suggesting that what feels barren can also hold seeds. “As the spring comes only after the winter,” says Hessler, “the ensuing dawn only appears from the inky night.”

Jacob Bond Hessler is a graduate of the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara and pursued his master’s degree in graphic design at Parsons, The New School for Design. He worked in New York as a commercial photographer and art director from 2006 to 2011, when he returned to his hometown in midcoast Maine to focus on his fine art photography. In 2017, Hessler released Boundaries, a limited-edition fine-press book of photographs and poetry in collaboration with 2013 presidential inaugural poet Richard Blanco, published by Two Ponds Press. The original photographs and poems from Boundaries have been exhibited at the Coral Gables Museum, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and the Ogunquit Museum of American Art.

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