ICAExhibitions: 2023

The Last Season on Earth: Maine College of Art & Design 2023 Faculty Triennial

Gallery view of two dynamic sculptures depicting dancing figures in front of a blue and red painting depicting burning trees.

Dates

  • On View: January 13 – February 19, 2023
  • Exhibition Reception: January 13, 5:00 – 7:00pm

About the Show

The Last Season on Earth: Maine College of Art & Design 2023 Faculty Triennial, juried by Sam Adams, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Allen Memorial Museum at Oberlin College.

The exhibition presents the work of artists who teach across the College in the Textile & Fashion Design, Photography, Painting, Metalsmithing & Jewelry, Sculpture, MFA, and MAT programs.

"The submissions and selected works for the 2023 MECA&D faculty exhibition balance on a razor’s edge between fantasy and fear, chaos and cosmos. They register a lowkey but constant sense of anxiety about the human impact on the natural world. Can we love the Earth as much as we love ourselves? Can the pursuit of power, technology, and pleasure be ethical and ecologically sustainable?

These works are proposals for the necessity of art in the Anthropocene. Visual signs and images have arguably always oriented people in the world. More specifically, though, a sense of homo faber—of humans as makers—emerges here through the daily practice of art. These processes are acts of interpretation, feeling, energy, and mental health—in short, of art making as an act of survival." - Sam Adams

ARTISTS: Elana Adler, Tabitha Barnard '16, Philip Brou, Tracey Cockrell, Jeane Cohen, Kyle Patnaude, Joshua Reiman, Rachel Somerville, Benjamin Spalding MFA '17, Ling-Wen Tsai

Gallery view of a red and green dystopian painting next to a sculpture depicting a seagull watching a phone.
Two mounted sculptures with buttons beneath them.
Gallery view of a framed white rectangle piece next to a black cart carrying five metallic structures.
Two white-framed collages. The left is white, brown, and magenta. The right is white, blue, green, and purple.
Two paintings depicting realistically rendered stoic figures beneath plastic coverings.
Two photographs, the left depicting a woman with a band of light coming across her face, the right depicting two feminine figures looking.
Three abstract woven pieces
A standing black and white sculpture depicting a nude masculine figure kneeling, facing away, holding a flogger next to another structure of a metallic flogger.

Press

Portland Press Herald: Maine College of Art & Design faculty show ranges from serene to apocalyptic (Feb. 2023)