PORTLAND, Maine — From supine video installations to a cornucopia of welded spikes to baskets woven by a Penobscot artist, the Portland Museum of Art’s “You Can’t Get There From Here” exhibition is a broad and edifying survey of Maine’s current artscape.
For the museum’s ninth biennial, which opened this month, guest curator Alison Ferris visited 50 artists in their studios. From Brooklin basket maker Sarah Sockbeson’s intricate and colorful hand-woven vessels to University of Maine professor Owen F. Smith’s video installation “Dreaming of Possibilities” to Lois Dodd’s naturalistic oil paintings, the biennial is a diverse romp through Maine’s creative landscape.
“What I love about the exhibition is that there are a lot of visual conversations happening in the galleries, which I believe makes it a vibrant and engaging exhibition,” Ferris said.
By focusing on the creative process as much as the end result, the curator searched for a group of artists that were “as diverse as possible” while “creating an exhibition that had visual cohesiveness.”
That cohesiveness is evident in the work of Sockbeson, who became interested in basket weaving while living on Indian Island. Her great-grandmother made baskets from trees, but the craft skipped a few generations. Sockbeson, 31, sought the help of tribal members to learn the trade.
“I have only seen one or two baskets made by my great-grandmother, but the old antique baskets do inspire me,” said the artist, who “likes to infuse contemporary elements and colors, and create my own modern renditions.”
She starts with finding a brown ash tree and pounding the wood into splints. They are then scraped to a smooth surface and dyed and woven together on a block with sweetgrass and wood.
“I have a responsibility to honor my ancestors that have practiced the art of basketry long before I was alive. It’s immensely satisfying to know that I am able to perform this tradition in nearly every way it was practiced years ago,” Sockbeson said. “Weaving is the closest thing to having a spiritual connection with the past.”
The exhibition spans traditional materials such as ash and birch bark but also includes technology and yoga mats. Smith, who heads up UMaine’s new media program, takes over a corner of the first-floor gallery and invites viewers to lie down and look up.
“Each of the four videos are a documentary record of what I saw while lying on my back on a nice summer day in Maine and watching the clouds pass by,” he said.
As clouds appear on screen and slowly change, the artist poses questions: “What is the role and function of humor and/or play in art?” and “How does technology shape our interaction with and knowledge of the world?”
See “You Can’t Get There From Here,” open until Jan. 3, to find out.
Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square. Museum admission is $12. The biennial show comes with a $5 surcharge. Free on Friday from 5 to 9 p.m. For more information, visit portlandmuseum.org or call 207-775-6148.
