UMVA Showcase – Spring 2025: Sally Stanton, Karen Adrienne, David Wade, James McCarthy

Sally Stanton

Fraught. Stomach-angst. Enraged. Powerless. Betrayed. Unsettled. Incredulous. Ashamed. Helpless, hopeless, and heartbroken.

My recent work mirrors how I feel as I weather the continuous, worsening, deliberately outrageous, unconstitutional, often illegal actions that are occurring daily. The paintings also mirror glimpses of people and events that enter into my consciousness, drawn from what steals my attention, what I am unable to turn away from, what resonates.

I wish to focus on quotidian concerns just as a matter of survival. But that hasn’t worked. Neither am I doomscrolling. Some friends and loved ones want to turn inward, look only around their immediate geographic circle—where comfort can be found: evidence of kind and generous and reasonable human activity. And I see evidence of this all the time; it is not reflected in the screaming media landscape. But I also want to be aware of what is happening, and what I, as a citizen, can do . . . if anything.

What is the role of any artist in times like these? Well, first is to remain sane, and to do that we must keep working. A painting isn’t going to feed hungry children or right injustices. Immersing myself in the creative act, falling into color, line, and form is what makes me a functioning person, able to stay true to the values that unite most of us, I believe—despite recent election numbers—to help each other, play fair, honor our home: Earth, local community, human family.

Lately I am trying more often to embrace silence. Turn off everything and wrap the quiet around me like a safe, warm shroud. But we can’t allow ourselves to be silenced. The work of artists can bear witness or inspire courage, whether literally or emotionally. For some artists this means unabashed political works, and for others, it may be creating art that offers an opportunity for quiet reflection or a moment of peaceful timelessness. For many of us, our art lands somewhere along that spectrum.

 

Karen Adrienne

In times like these it would be encouraging to hear the sound of my mother’s voice. It carried strength, conviction, and clarity. She died twenty-five years ago and the faded memory of her voice assumes the pervasive power of absence. That absence does not mean nonexistence, but the full awareness of resonant loss.

The intaglio with chine collé, The Sound of My Mother’s Voice, evokes the process of altered continuations. Like a voice that no longer exists, the absence is as powerful as the presence once was.

 

David Wade

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We live in unsure and tenuous times. The world as we know it is under assault. I wake up every day with a sense of fear and apprehension, not knowing whether the landscape will be engulfed in flames or swept away by floodwaters, or whether those pillars of society we erected over the centuries will still be standing tomorrow. We watch in horror while those we entrusted to govern and protect our rights sit silently by and the entire framework of values and operating principles we have lived our lives with is being dismantled before our eyes.

I am feeling like a stranger in a strange land. It is as if the world has been turned upside down. I have become a captive, a prisoner of circumstances. The resulting feeling of hopelessness is powerful, but I must resist. The best remedy is to pick up my camera and see if I can make some sense out of it, or discover some new landscape where I can take refuge. Sometimes it is in the fog of uncertainty . . .

 

James McCarthy

Mornings begin with a cup of coffee and a quick online review of the news. Heather Cox Richardson. New York Times. Washington Post. Portland Press Herald. Bangor Daily News. Followed by a second cup of coffee and breakfast. Most mornings the news is almost more than I can bear.

Which is exactly what the oligarchs and their procured front-man Donald Trump want us to feel, knowing full well that civic paralysis makes their authoritarian takeover of our democracy that much easier. So my wife and I have made a point of doing volunteer work to help those who were already marginalized . . . in hopes that it will ensure things won’t get worse for them.  As for us, we do our best to live simply, eating food we’ve grown ourselves and being grateful we live in a warm solar-powered home. We’ve called out our congresspeople for failing to stand up to the White House bully as forcefully as we believe they should. We are more diligent in connecting with distant family and friends, making sure to ask them how they are holding up and always ending on the note: “We love you!”

I’m less certain about how to respond photographically. I’m not sure I have enough chutzpah to affix to my camera what Woody Guthrie stuck on his guitar: “This machine kills fascists.” I’m continuing to work on a long-term project begun four years ago, pondering and re-pondering questions about what a white guy from away might learn from ancestral Wabanaki place names about this place called Maine that has been my home for fifty-one years.

My daily practice is to continue paying attention to the gifts each day might bring into my life, the joy and sadness of living in a world that goes on being generous in its exquisite beauty even when we humans seem determined to burn it up with our fossil fuels.

So I offer this small collection of images, each taken with my iPhone camera, each made in a spontaneous act of “yes”:

• A tiny bluebird trapped in our basement stove, carefully rescued by our town’s Animal Control Officer, held for a moment before its release into the cold January air. It immediately flew to the utility line across the street, where it was joined within seconds by three other bluebirds. You cannot persuade me those birds were not joyful as they greeted one they thought was lost and gone forever.
• A basset hound returning my photographer’s gaze during Bath’s Fourth of July parade last summer, its upside-down American flag perfectly expressing my own feelings of distress over President Biden’s disastrous 27 June debate against Trump’s shameless deluge of lies.
• The awe I felt watching the 8 April total solar eclipse with family and friends on a Lake Erie beach with a hundred strangers who came together as one and cheered when the sky darkened and the moon passed in front of the sun, blocking its rays and sending gulls out over the lake back to their nesting islands.
• A birch tree, just barely leafed out, knocked over by an overnight windstorm—a reminder that everything is ephemeral. By summer’s end that birch would become a barren toppled tree. And yet, to my eye at least, still beautiful.

I find solace in such moments. And when I share these images with family and friends I’m heartened that they find solace in them as well. Surely that must count for something?