Join three contemporary New England artists at the Portland Museum of Art for a conversation exploring imagined marinescapes in dialogue with the work of Winslow Homer.
Patricia Brace, Ethan Murrow, and Joshua Reiman each use the evocative power of place-based imagery to explore how landscapes can conjure memory, emotion, and a sense of human presence. Together, they'll discuss how imagined landscapes create shared experiences that linger somewhere between dream and reality.
Patricia Brace will discuss her work A Sun Without A Sphere. This work signals catastrophe and boundlessness: the sun uncontained, radiating without orbit, and the ceaseless Arctic light. Created in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, where warming occurs five times faster than the global average, the work confronts the climate crisis through performance, kinship, and fragile endurance.
Ethan Murrow will speak about his drawing, painting, and lithography works that seem to let you in on a story happening somewhere at the edge of the world. His characters inhabit fantastical landscapes doing familiar yet absurd actions. His detailed drawings speak to the mysterious realm between human action and vast pastoral landscapes.
Joshua Reiman will share his short film Vanished into Plein Air which provides a romantic view of a marinescape painter who ventures outside to make a painting by the ocean, and realizes the nature is just not good enough without people to inhabit his canvases. Shot in Prout's Neck, Maine and inspired by Winslow Homer's last painting Driftwood, the film offers us a glimpse into an artistic process, where one’s emotions meet pigment and oil beside the ocean and rocky shore.