This work focuses on a more minimal approach to ceremony, ritual and art. Over the years, I have simplified forms often relying on horizontal banding to give both structure to the work and give homage to the sacred striped clown and trickster persona worldwide. Within the banding, there is a great field of play that allows for an infinite range of aesthetic, psychological, philosophical and mythological discovery and exposure. Yet just when things are discovered and exposed, they become all the more mysterious. So we return to wood, canvas, paper, metal, our technology and clay to fashion items that somehow capture for us a glimpse of the great mysteries of life and repeat what our ancestors have done and what our descendants too will continue to do: create layer upon layer, band upon band over and over again... always new, always the same.

- Paul Oberst 

While working in my studio in Belfast, Maine, I realized that I needed to prioritize my ideas regarding the relationship between subject matter and form. Although the works appear abstract, they are based on a simplified reality of sky, sea, sand, and “figures”... that is, rocks that are at rest, those that balance precariously on each other and those that float. This precariousness and levitating reinforced the sense of the abstract. I found this simpler subject matter/composition from the sky, sea, sand, and rocks of Penobscot Bay.

-Tom Gaines

COREY DANIELS GALLERY will present to mark anon, an exhibition featuring sculpture, paintings, and drawings by Maine artists Tim Wilson and Neal Beckerman. Both artists re-appropriate a Romantic aesthetic and employ gestural mark-making techniques to render somber, powerful figures that imply mythical narratives. Their meditations on the human form are joined in the gallery by the work of an anonymous, found artist’s anatomical studies and off-beat religious scenes. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, July 9th from 5-9pm.

These works are an attempt to merge overarching themes of history and age amidst personal narrative and struggle. The aging process moulders. Paintings begin to fleck and peel, displaying the artists true hand. Elements of sketch, rework and frustration arise through each receding layer. My own character embodies two distinct ideals: one of perfected render, and one of gestural movement. Underpaintings and sketches are reworked, scraped, layered and destroyed. The final product teetering a fragile balance of completion. The process of mouldering age exponentially quickened and revealed.

-Tim Wilson

I am working on a series of abstract sculptural reliefs, in some ways similar to broken fragments of fifth century Greek marble sculpture. There are possibly also mouldy books and ripped open 1920’s boarding houses, and bugs.Although this sounds as if I am engaged in an outdated form of expression intended to affirm something, I don’t lose sight of all the newer forms of witty cheesiness, the self-referencing irony, the declining standards all over the place. A presentation of a ‘powerful indecision’ might describe what I am trying to do; a work of art doesn’t need to take a side, even if it turns out to be the side with more people on it.  It should embody truth, which is that we don’t know what is going to happen.

- Neal Beckerman

COREY DANIELS GALLERY will extend the screening of Deborah Wing-Sproul's "Tidal Culture: Part IV (Iceland)" through Tuesday, July 5th.

"Performance and ephemeral objects suggest elements of time and impermanence. In my work I use these elements as metaphors for the vulnerable, temporal nature of the collective human experience. In Tidal Culture I'm interested in using aspects of time and impermanence to address and reflect upon current conditions of the world as well as the relationships between and among cultures." 

-deborah wing-sproul

COREY DANIELS GALLERY will present TROPOS, an exhibition featuring Maine artists Alisha Gould and Sean O’Brien. Employing multidisciplinary approaches, O’Brien and Gould investigate human interaction with and perceptions of the physical world and its structures. Large-scale installations in the gallery activate an interactive dialogue concerning temporality, liminality, the ethereal, and the mundane. Both engage in rigorous and meticulous practices with hyper-consideration of materiality and process, resulting in works that manifest the multi-dimensionality of their concepts. An opening reception will take place on Friday, May 13, 5 – 8pm. 

Alisha Gould currently lives and works in Kennebunk ME, and is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, with an MFA from Maine College of Art. Her work has been exhibited throughout Maine, Rhode Island and New York, and has been featured in both the 2011 and 2005 Portland Museum of Art Biennials. Her sculptural works, installations, drawings and photo-based projects question the polarities that prevail in the perception of spatial relationships, and investigate the dynamic threshold between binary oppositions. 

Sean O’Brien received his BA from Massachusetts College of Art and currently lives and works in Portland ME. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including Axiom Gallery in Cambridge MA, Gallery 51 in North Adams MA, Way Out Gallery in Rennselaerville NY, and Korpulfsstadir in Reykjavik, Iceland. He has been a resident at SIM Residency in Reykjavik, Iceland and will be at the Quimby Colony in Portland ME next year.

Review by Nicholas Schroeder in the Portland Phoenix

"But for all the heavy lifting going on in "Tropos," one of the most present concepts, ironically enough, is emptiness. In nearly every instance, the artists' works are bound by a pervasive absence, and one of the many pleasures of the exhibit is observing the avenue — either conceptual or process-based — by which absence finds its way in.The element of absence is obvious in the four 20" x 24" Polaroid prints of Sean O'Brien's "Still : Life" series, and the photographs are the most immediate works in the room. The subject of each is a rose, its petals shattered by a foreign mass into disarticulate confetti. Reaping the benefits of a rare bird in analog photography (the Polaroid 20x24 camera O'Brien used is one of only six left in existence), the artist engineered his shot by freezing the flowers so that the petals calcify, then setting the camera to capture the precise moment a pellet gun runs them through. With the trifecta of drama, symbolism, and a nostalgic medium, you might find "Still : Life" elicits an emotional response, which in the field of contemporary high art, can be as rare as a four-leaf clover..."Stratus" is a series of four meticulously woven lattice forms created and hung by Alicia Gould, whose studies in absent space have drawn high praise in the this year's Portland Museum of Art Biennial and last year's MFA thesis exhibition at MECA. Here, she succeeds once again in dramatically transforming a room. Her enormous netted forms are diaphanous and precious, delicately marking the empty space in the room's core. They do it so well, in fact, that after the viewer spends some time in the gallery, they create almost an opposite effect, hovering ominously as a sort of impasse or division line."

untitled [spring fever/pilgrimage], 2008

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ice cutting [4.11.04], 2004

Jacob Galle investigates contemporary notions of manual work by inventing and performing acts on unnecessary physical labor. He inserts his personal experiences working as a farmer and woodman into fine art practice, problematizing the romanticized perception of farming and the rural life as being “simple”. Galle received his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and currently maintains a studio practice and manages his family’s sheep farm in Bowdoinham, Maine. He has presented solo exibitions at Valise Gallery, Vashon, WA (2010) and Alfred State College, Alfred, NY (2010) among many others, was included in the Portland Museum of Art Biennial in 2009, and has been awarded numerous artist residencies and grants for his work.