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The Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly

The Unconscious, the Unknown, the Unsaid

Spring 2024

As this issue shows, art is a potent tool for exploration and to confront difficult topics. Giving shape and voice to the unconscious, the unknown, and the unsaid, the artist is at once explorer, excavator, archaeologist, historian, midwife, shaman, medium, magician, therapist . . . but, more simply put, curious and courageous. 

From the Editors: Natasha Mayers, Nora Tryon, Véronique Plesch, Betsy Sholl (poetry editor), with the help of Colby interns Sofia Escobar Amaya and Audrey Loo.

The Union of Maine Visual Artists is proud to produce the Maine Arts Journal, with generous contributions from the Rabkin Foundation, Judith Glickman Lauder, Kent Gordon, and other donors. The MAJ helps us promote and advocate for the visual arts, artists, and all arts supporters. Learn more and become a UMVA member here. The MAJ is dependent on UMVA membership dues.

 

Maine Arts Journal Spring 2024 cover (Eva Rose Goetz, Carrying Her Home, acrylic gouache on board, 24 x 30 in., 2023 [photo: Ben Clay]).

Eva Rose Goetz

Eva Rose Goetz

In 2023 my paintings became informed by personal loss and collective grieving. As a society we were still recovering from our walk within COVID’s halls. Personally, within a six-month period, Mogi, my dog of thirteen years, died; Mom passed at ninety-five; and a...

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Elizabeth Fox

Elizabeth Fox

My paintings are open-ended narratives, leaving room for various outcomes and are in their very nature unknowable. They can show the submerged mind as individuals in scenes or relations between characters with various motivations. Keeping in mind the subject of the...

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Nancy Andrews

Nancy Andrews

I refer to the unknown and the unknowable in my work, whether it is through the story of a scientist who is trying to extend their sense by grafting on animal senses (The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes) or the character Ima Plume, Public Illustrator, who says: There were...

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Carey Cameron – Ken Bryant: Inside Out

Carey Cameron – Ken Bryant: Inside Out

I am not a visual artist. I am a writer. I am also a collector of Maine “outsider” art. The artists I collect may be outsiders in the art world, in the sense that most of them have had no formal training, nor gained recognition through traditional routes, but they are...

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Reed McLean – Manifold

Reed McLean – Manifold

What follows is a description of a private event on a cold fall night in rural Maine. An artist is called to fulfill her unconscious need to be free of her work, a need which supersedes the accountability we expect. We don’t know why she is doing this, we don’t know...

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Lucy Lippard – Mining the Mines: Stephanie Garon Gold Rush

Lucy Lippard – Mining the Mines: Stephanie Garon Gold Rush

Stephanie Garon is uniquely prepared to mine the residue and history of a spurious “gold rush,” in northern Maine, of all places. I’ve been to Maine every summer of my octogenarian life, and until two years ago I had no idea that mining was a factor in the state’s...

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Gianne Conard – Kindred Futures: Through Our Eyes

Gianne Conard – Kindred Futures: Through Our Eyes

Kindred Futures: Through Our Eyes, the exhibit at Waterfall Arts in February 2024, draws from several cultures’ stories, repressed histories, atavistic dreams, and extensive research. Showing the work of four Maine artists from underrepresented or historically...

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Carl Little – On Dreams

Carl Little – On Dreams

Who Am I to Interpret? It's too bad that all these things Can only happen in my dreams Only in dreams In beautiful dreams. –Roy Orbison, from “In Dreams” Sometime in my twenties I read Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in the Modern Library edition (1950)...

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Véronique Plesch – Dark Dreams

Véronique Plesch – Dark Dreams

Beginnings As the Maine Arts Journal pursues its commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Surrealism, we chose for this issue to focus on what is perhaps the most important notion for the movement, that of the unconscious. As we know, Sigmund Freud first...

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Stuart Kestenbaum – Awaiting the Answer

Stuart Kestenbaum – Awaiting the Answer

I’m not a procrastinator by nature, but there are certain questions I’ve tried to avoid. Those are the deep down ones that you know you’ll need to answer sooner or later. It’s similar to the feeling you might have gotten in high school when you hadn’t read the...

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Claire Millikin – Poetry

Claire Millikin – Poetry

In Claire Millikin’s poem we see the speaker in those semi-delirious days of new motherhood finding that an abandoned house and a family of porcupines become figures that can carry some of the mysteries and emotions of her new life. Larry Levis, in an essay called...

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Ellen Goldsmith – Poetry

Ellen Goldsmith – Poetry

“The mouth speechless”—Isn’t that what grief brings us to, ecstasy and grief, those most primal emotions that take us somewhere beyond the rational, into the body, into a making that has to let itself be taken over and cannot just choose what to say, has to be said...

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Linda Aldrich – Poetry

Linda Aldrich – Poetry

In Down Spiral so many things seem to merge in ways the rational mind can’t explain. The speaker feels an inner fog, a kind of loosening of identity while her dog hopes she will remember who she is and what they do. Then her friend, a singer, seems to associate song...

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Alan Crichton – Terry Winters / Mark Melnicove

Alan Crichton – Terry Winters / Mark Melnicove

Terry Winters / Mark Melnicove: Sometimes times The unconscious, the unknown, the unsaid: mirror images of these “uns” are the things themselves—the conscious, the known, the spoken. In between non-existence and existence are the sparks of art. The artist approaches...

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Carl Little – Bern Porter’s Founds, or Reader, Heal Thyself

Carl Little – Bern Porter’s Founds, or Reader, Heal Thyself

In his message from the “deathless, universal plasma” that opens Now It Can Be—Why Did It Fail Before?, a new collection of his “founds,” Bern Porter (1911–2004), “formerly of Belfast, ME,” recounts his long-time commitment to the practice of providing self-help and...

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David Estey – UMVA’s Extraordinary Annual Report

David Estey – UMVA’s Extraordinary Annual Report

Our Vision We recognize that artists’ connections to one another and the world enhance their creativity and support, as well as enrich the common good. Our vision is the creation of an interconnected, mutually-supportive, ever-growing, and sustainable, State-wide...

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David Estey – How to Prepare Your Work for Exhibit

David Estey – How to Prepare Your Work for Exhibit

This is the second installment of a four-part series on how to exhibit, prepare and promote your work, plus how to think about curators judging it. I have drawn on lectures, workshops, research, and nearly thirty years of twenty-four solo exhibits and over one-hundred...

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UMVA Midcoast Chapter  Update – Spring 2024

UMVA Midcoast Chapter Update – Spring 2024

Above Us Only Sky, 1–27 June, Camden Public Library   In the spirit of “UMVA Members and Friends,” three UMVA member artists, Mary Brooking of Westbrook, Jane Gilbert of Orland and Key West, and Deb Vendetti of South Hope, along with invited guest Dee Peppe of...

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ARRT! Update – Spring 2024

ARRT! Update – Spring 2024

ARRT! (The Artists’ Rapid Response Team!) works with progressive groups and organizations throughout Maine, providing images that can help to distill and clarify their important messages about issues that matter to people in Maine and the world beyond our borders....

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LumenARRT! Update – Spring 2024

LumenARRT! Update – Spring 2024

LumenARRT! is a project of the Artists’ Rapid Response Team (ARRT!). We work through the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA), a members’ organization that advocates for artists and furthers the work of progressive non-profits in the state of Maine. Our video...

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Maine Masters Update: Lois Dodd – Screening

Maine Masters Update: Lois Dodd – Screening

Part of the UMVA’s Maine Masters film series will be screened free via Zoom on 11 April at 6:30 p.m., followed by a discussion with painter Lois Dodd, curator Suzette McAvoy, art critic Karen Wilkin, and filmmaker Richard Kane. Email kanelewisproductions@gmail.com to...

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Pat and Tony Owen – What Goes Unsaid

Pat and Tony Owen – What Goes Unsaid

Here in Ireland we feed the birds. We have been doing this since day one when we moved here, it's a habit we have, a tradition we never gave up on. Back in Maine we had a very large bird feeder in our backyard. We kept it filled with sunflower seeds and peanuts. As...

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