The few, the proud, the Biennial

The PMA shows the best from Maine and beyond

By Jenna Russell

2001 Portland Museum of Art Biennial runs through June 3, at the PMA. Call (207) 775-6148.

Downstairs in the cafe at the Portland Museum of Art, Jason Rogenes sat in a roped-off alcove, preparing large, sculptural blocks of white styrofoam to be hoisted high in the air. His installation, “Project Chimera,” still existed mostly in his mind, with a few days to go before the opening of the museum’s second Biennial show, and the young artist knew his deliberate pace was making the staff nervous.

“I tend to work very carefully,” Rogenes explained, his hands moving steadily between the tools on the floor and wires in his lap. “There’s a lot of thinking before anything goes up.”

“I think they’d be happy if I finished today,” he reflected calmly, with a broad, knowing smile, and not even a glance at the cluster of staff eating lunch at a table nearby.

A 29-year-old Wisconsin native who moved to Newcastle, Maine two years ago from Los Angeles, Rogenes was excited about being chosen for the Biennial, which showcases 58 artists out of 831 who submitted slides. He was honored, but he wasn’t about to accelerate his process. This was just as it should be. The museum had taken a risk. With it came the electricity in the air, excitement and expectation, and inevitable fear of failure.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. The 2001 Biennial is a success, a sumptuous spread of arresting photography, sleek and sculptural furniture, dazzling art books, dreamy paper abstractions, and paintings in a global range of modern dialects. Diversity rules. There’s a quilt, a woman’s shoe made of mirror shards, and a video installation exploring two middle-class childhoods, one African-American, the other Jewish. Sculpture veers from a traditional marble of two draped figures to a life-size replica of a plump, pink porch mattress, utterly convincing but actually carved out of wood.

No single work embodies the show’s sensitivity and daring any better than “Flock,” the installation by Ralph Bourque II that greets visitors in the museum’s main hall. A masterpiece of grand-scale subtlety, it encompasses 2,000 tiny wire clothes hangers attached to the wall in shifting densities that imitate flocks of distant, flying birds. Each wire casts a spidery shadow. At press time, the songbirds’ soundtrack was not yet installed, and the piece was quiet enough to go almost unnoticed. Paid a moment’s attention, its sweeping delicacy suddenly became breathtaking.

Bourque also embodies the flexible residency requirement for which the Biennial has occasionally been criticized. He lives in Brooklyn; his link to Maine was a 1999 summer residency at the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. There are a number of recent Skowhegan School alumni among the 16 artists in the show who don’t call Maine home. Others are summer residents. Curator Aprile Gallant said a few submissions were disqualified because the artists hadn’t spent any time at all in Maine in the last two years.

“Any limits are going to be arbitrary,” she said. “We decided to err on the side of inclusiveness.”

By including both known and unknown artists, the Biennial is a major gesture of outreach and inclusion, even if a few artists have tenuous ties to the state. It’s invaluable exposure for younger talents, and they are well-represented — the Biennial includes 25 artists born since 1960, eight children of the 1970s. That makes it a rare glimpse into the future, at some of the people who will decide what Maine art is in 2020. The show’s senior statesmen are still working at 70-something.

The museum temporarily hosted a biennial show in the 1980s, and abandoned it for reasons that no one clearly remembers. Maine Coast Artists in Rockport had a long tradition of showcasing the state’s best and brightest on an annual basis, and the museum approached the respected gallery in recent years to talk about sharing the responsibility. They decided to pass the biennial back and forth between them, and Portland first hosted it in the fall of 1998. The move to spring is meant to be permanent.

The project is important for two reasons, said Gallant. It broadens the public’s understanding of “Maine art,” while providing a much-needed exhibition opportunity for hard-working artists all over the state.

The 2001 Biennial includes fewer paintings than the 1998 show, despite the participation of painter David Driskell on the three-member jury that considered 3,300 slides in two days last summer. The other jurors were Nina Nielsen of Boston’s Nielsen Gallery, and Cheryl Brutvan, curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

ROGER RICHARDSON, RUMFORD BICENTENNIAL PORTRAIT: by Mark Silber, 1999, gelatin silver print, 11” x 14”.

It appears they agreed on the high caliber of Maine photography, making it one of this Biennial’s best-represented mediums. These are some of the show’s most memorable images: Scott Peterman’s oversized pictures of boys in their swim trunks, dropping out of blackness into the Royal River; Melonie Bennett’s Uncle Roger, grinning over his radio; Sa Schloff’s eerie, unpeopled interiors, where molded plastic chairs attain an unexpectedly lush, iconic presence.

Jonathan Bailey, who courts ambiguity with a plastic Diana camera prone to light leaks, also earns high marks. So does Paul D’Amato, whose stark and dignified portraits can also be seen upstairs in the museum’s “Local Color” photography show.

Tanja Hollander, another star of “Local Color,” is well-represented in the Biennial. Her large, square prints often obscure the landscape through screens or curtains, placing reality at a blurred, uncertain remove that imitates the distortion of dreams or memory. In one window study, gauzy curtains filter the green glow of a sunny garden. The title, “When Noah Was Sleeping,” tells us this is the forced dimness of naptime, with all the shuttered longing that daytime sleep brings with it.

Before serving on the Biennial jury, Driskell said, he had never surveyed so many slides at once. For him, the variety shattered any lingering stereotypes of Maine artists as landscape painters.

“It was such a rich variety, it projected a national style rather than something regional,” he said.

So how did he narrow the field? “I’m looking for an innovative initiative on the part of the artist,” explained the Maryland painter, also a scholar of African-American art, who summers in Maine. “How personal it is — not relying on the Wyeth tradition, or abstract expressionism.”

Standout examples of personal initiative include the strange oil painting “Portrait (Beaded Dress)” by South Portland’s Anne Harris. It’s more or less indescribable, the wet, electric eyes the only sharp things in a mist of pearl beading and floating, greenish hat-fur or hair. Jen Blackstone and Jessica Gandolf are also pure originals, as different as milk and granite. Gandolf strives for intimate majesty in her miniature oils of great old baseball players, while Blackstone marks time and decay in vague, scarred layers of oil, wax, and plaster. In “My Little Spanish Prison,” the front of the thick, pale slab is bashed in, as if from a long-forgotten collision.

For pure beauty, you can’t beat the handcrafted furniture in the Biennial. Much more than a token table here or there, the furniture is a significant, weighty presence, a real tribute to the state’s many function-minded artists. Its thoughtful placement is a credit to the show’s curators, enhancing the experience of surrounding works.

In the first room, the Biennial’s strongest overall, spotlights illuminate an elegant oval settee by Kennebunk designer John Costin. The wood, curly maple and Swiss pearwood, glows; the pink, nubuck leather cushion is as firm and downy-soft as the flesh of a peach. The settee sits in front of a large nighttime cityscape by painter Yvonne Jacquette, its warmth drawing out the orange headlights at the edge of the pastel’s dark, green and blue water. Another Costin stands nearby, a tall, sleek pearwood cabinet with a mirrored interior hidden behind twin doors. It’s the perfect companion for Sa Schloff’s “6188 Bradley Hall,” a color photograph of a dim institutional hallway with a closed wooden door at its center.

Costin said the Biennial marked the first time he was able to enter his furniture in a juried all-media show. “Especially in the last 10 years, furniture has really moved into the art realm. Work is being done at a very high conceptual level, at a high level of craftsmanship, but the venues for showing it are still catching up,” he said. “It’s a little bit ghetto-ized. This is great exposure for the studio furniture movement.”

The Biennial object most likely to inspire gasps of amazement may be the Adirondack buffet by Randy Holden. It’s a massive block of wooden furniture finished with exquisite details — acorn hinges, embedded pine cones, rows of neatly trimmed, red and gray twigs bordering drawers and cabinets faced with chalky birch bark. The piece is incredible, over-the-top, like a detail from the Disney version of the lakeside lodge. It conjures up pictures of an impossibly grand, rustic lifestyle, all misty morning canoe rides and block-headed retrievers sprawled by stone fireplaces.

Holden’s work is heavy on texture. So is a wall-spanning installation by John Bisbee made of welded nails in different incarnations. Each of the 16 clusters has its own character — nails are bent and assembled to look like tumbleweeds, pine cones, bedsprings, fake eyelashes. The artist demolishes the apparent immutability of the material, and the viewer gapes at the spectacle. Patricia Campbell also makes the most of simple materials, layering swirls of transparent white paper on light reed frames. In “Surf Play,” the paper wafts and curls like smoke. The pattern is transient, hypnotic, linked end-to-end like a symbol for the infinite.

Given the 800-plus submissions, and the limited time the jurors had to review them, it seems obvious the 2001 Biennial is only one of many outcomes that might have been culled from the same stack of slides. That’s not factoring in the disadvantage faced by some media in any slide-based assessment.

Portland gallery owner June Fitzpatrick said she knows some very good artists whose work doesn’t translate in slides, who might not even bother to submit unless they knew jurors were familiar with their work. Fitzpatrick doesn’t look at slides at all until she’s seen an artist’s work up close and in person.

Biennial juror and Boston gallery owner Nina Nielsen acknowledged the difficulty of reviewing slides, even with almost 40 years of experience doing it.

“You can get a feeling for the organization, and the originality, but the actual physical properties are harder to assess,” she said. “You run into conceptual work, which is difficult, and sculpture, which is probably the worst, because you want to walk around it . . . It’s far from adequate, but I don’t know how else you could do it.”

Certainly, 800 studio visits would be impossible. And even if it could be done, someone, somewhere, could probably find unfairness in the process.

“It’s so easy to sit on the sidelines and think of ways to do it better,” said Fitzpatrick. “I always admire when institutions do something like this. It’s a monumental task. It’s easy to be pure and say ‘Excellence or nothing.’ But life isn’t pure, and we have to do whatever we can to help art be seen.”

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.