ica : current exhibition

Miller & Shellabarger, Untitled Cameo (Beards with Bow)

Carved sardonic shell on sterling silver mount, 2009.

Mind-bending with the Mudane

September 1 - October 17, 2010

Mind-bending with the Mudane is an exhibition occasioned by the fact that marriage equality remains a civil rights question in Maine, among other places. Three independent artists and one husband and husband team present the mundane realities of private lives for public examination in this exhibition curated by Adriane Herman, Associate Professor of Printmaking and Digital Imaging at Maine College of Art.

The exhibition will feature a wide variety of media such as photography, performance, performance residue, engravings, bureaucratic documents and installation. Miller & Shellabarger chart their lives in specific and mundane detail, documenting their ongoing joint presence in the world largely because their relationship is socially invisible at best, and renders them subject to discrimination or violence at worst. Andrew Raftery places contemporary life on display with old master authority in engravings depicting real estate open houses. Allison Smith reminds us that revolutionaries fighting for causes they find worthy can be bolstered by a resting place to proclaim and reflect upon their beliefs. Alix Lambert highlights the often fleeting nature of marriage by documenting the four weddings and divorces she undertook in six months, one of which took place in a drive-through Vegas wedding chapel.

Miller & Shellabarger: Husband and husband artist team Dutes Miller & Stan Shellabarger’s performances and artist books document the bittersweet rhythms of human relationships. Their performance work, always enacted in public and always together, focuses on simple materials and actions pushed to almost Sisyphean extremes: shifting between moments of togetherness and separation, protection and pain, visibility and invisibility and spaces private and public. Their work functions in a manner that is both autobiographical and metaphorical, and speaks to the common experience of human interaction as well as the specific experiences of queer relationships. Miller & Shellabarger have performed at the Hyde Park art Center in Chicago, IL, the Lakeview Performance Festival and Western Exhibitions, Chicago. They were the 2008 recipients of an Artadia Chicago Award and the 2007 recipients of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award.

Alix Lambert: The sheer convenience of wedding and divorcing was the starting point for Lambert’s Wedding Project, an art piece in which she married and divorced three men and one woman in the space of six months. Two weddings took place in the New York City courthouse, one at a drive through in Vegas, and another in Hungary. While Lambert insists there are important distinctions between weddings and marriages, ceremonies and commitments, her experiment suggests that for better or for worse, getting hitched and unhitched in America can resemble a trip to a fast food drive-through. Alix Lambert's feature length documentary The Mark of Cain was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and aired on Nightline. She has produced additional segments of Nightline as well as 7 segments for the PBS series, LIFE 360. She wrote Episode 6, season 3 of Deadwood: “A Rich Find.” Lambert has exhibited her work to international critical acclaim, including venues such as the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Kwangju Biennnale.

Allison Smith makes connections between the Civil War and current events to reflect the ambivalence between mainstream and counter-cultural values in the art world, feminist and queer communities, and the nation at large. Using analogies such as the “Red State/Blue State” cultural divide in relation to The Blue and The Grey, or the notion of Secession versus Union, Smith’s work discusses instances of queer mustering—the riots at New York’s Stonewall Inn and other quasi-militaristic displays of force such as Queer Nation, the Gay Pride Parade and the Rainbow flag. Commenting on how the Bush Administration’s musterings of fear and panic around the issue of same-sex civil union effectively swayed the vote in the 2004 elections, Smith recalls the culture wars and campaigns for freedom of expression in the 80s and 90s. Allison Smith has exhibited her work in numerous international venues, including recent exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Mildred Lane; Kemper Art Museum; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; University of California Berkeley Art Museum MATRIX series and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Andrew Raftery’s contemporary narratives—people in conversation, vacuuming the living room, shopping for cosmetics—draw the viewer into the immediacy of the situation, evoking a gentle irony. Familiar objects in everyday scenarios are rendered uncanny; Raftery’s masterful use of the historic medium of engraving both elevates and good-naturedly pokes fun at the comforts and foibles of domestic life. Raftery’s work has been featured in many exhibitions such as Portfolios and Series at the New York Public Library; Sixty Years of North American Prints: Collecting from The Boston Printmakers, Boston and at the University Art Gallery, Boston. He received the 2006 American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, the 2003 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and the 2001 Fritz Eichenberg Fellowship in Printmaking, Narrative Engraving Project, Rhode Island State Council for the Arts.

Events:

Miller & Shellabarger Performance: Untitled (Sewing)

Sept. 1, 1-4pm, ICA at MECA

Artist Talk with Miller & Shellabarger

Sept. 2, 4:30pm, Osher Hall

Artists’ Reception

Sept. 3, 5-8pm, ICA at MECA
Featuring Miller & Shellabarger Performance: Untitled (Pink Tube),

Artist Talk with Alix Lambert

Sept. 16, 3:30pm, Osher Hall

Curator's Tea with Adriane Herman

Sept. 30, 5:30-7pm, ICA at MECA

First Friday Artwalk

Oct. 1, 5-8pm, ICA at MECA

Debating Marriage Equality

Oct. 2, 5-7pm, Osher Hall
Judge and P.T.A. President Jeffrey S. Busch and queer artist/activist Ryan Conrad will present their arguments for and against marriage equality in a facilitated conversation with the audience.

Artist Talk with Andrew Raftery

Oct. 7, 3:30pm, Osher Hall

The ICA at MECA is located at 522 Congress Street in Portland. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and First Fridays until 8 p.m. Admission is free. Phone 207.699.5029.

Previous Exhibition:

A Meticulous Ferment: Beth Lipman & Kirsten Hassenfeld

June 23 - August 15, 2010

Opening reception: Wednesday, June 23, 5-8 PM

This two woman exhibition of magnificent objects and installations unfolds on a grand scale as the result of masterfully obsessive labor. That grandeur is shadowed, however, by an insidious dissonance lurking below the alluring surface.

Portland Phoenix review

Maine Sunday Telegram review

A Meticulous Ferment exhibition catalog

Designed by Margo Halverson and Charles Melcher of Alice Design Communication

Text by Lauren Fensterstock

20 pages, 6 1/4 x 10 in., available summer 2010, $15.00