In a Room by the Ocean
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Bri Bowman
Bri Bowman is a multimedia artist and herbalist based in Jefferson, ME whose work combines performance, sound, and sculpture to explore landscape as an internal experience and external phenomenon. Their work uses physical materials alongside energetic and emotional imprints to bridge the immediately personal experiences of longing, loss and oblivion with the shared ecology of slow process, animism and belonging. Combining media, Bowman invites viewers into relationship with their own aversions and desires.
Works in the exhibition:
Bri Bowman, The Boathouse, 2023, 20" x 25", Echo Point Seaweeds, Earl's Fishing Twine, wool, resin
Bri Bowman, The Woods, 2023, 16" x 25", Echo Point Seaweeds, Earl's Fishing Twine, wool, resin
Bri Bowman, Deterioration, 2023, 8:25m, video performance, videography Luke Myers, performance Bri Bowman
The three works are a visceral exploration of loss, landscape, and the battering of hinges between worlds. The works combine physical materials and surreal performance elements to interrogate memory loss, land loss, and the possibility of returning to places we can no longer access.
Isabel Hunter, originally from the Chicagoland area, currently lives in Portland, Maine. She graduated from the Chicago Academy for the Arts before completing her BFA in Contemporary Dance Performance along with a Psychology minor at the Boston Conservatory. She worked closely as a dancer and collaborator with Vancouver based dance collective, Addo Platform, in Canada and Portugal. She joined little house dance, a Portland based contemporary dance company under the direction of Heather Stewart, as a company member in 2020. Most recently she was awarded a fellowship at the Chulitna artist residency in Lake Clark, Alaska. Isabel has developed her own teaching and choreographic practice, working with studios and programs across Maine. She continues to develop her interests in performance, photography, writing, and collaborative work.
Performance on August 18
THE WAY DOWN, 2024
THE WAY DOWN is a solo work I choreographed and will perform myself. This piece was made from a study I conducted on spirals-investigating the spiral as a shape, as a pattern, and as an emotional landscape. The use of the chair connects me to the feeling of being alone in my room, as the piece has grown over time the chair has taken on different shapes and meanings. The work is ever-evolving and partly improvised to hold space for new possibilities. I would like to perform this work at your gallery, it is around 12 min but can be more durational or shorter depending on what the gallery needs. I am also into the idea of performing this work while other work is being shown/happening, it is something that can live amongst other things.
Tristan Koepke (he/him) is a dancer, choreographer, and educator based in Portland, ME. His creative works, collected as Big Boy Dance, have been presented by SPACE Gallery, CANDYBOX Dance Festival, Patrick’s Cabaret, Bryant Lake Bowl, Bates College, Bates Dance Festival, The Wooden Floor, Point Dance Ensemble, The 1419 Collective, and The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. He has performed in contemporary and experimental dance works by Chris Schlichting, Vanessa Anspaugh, luciana achugar, Cally Spooner, Doug Varone, Mathew Janczewski, Kendra Portier, Heidi Henderson, Matthew Cumbie, Annie Kloppenberg, and was a member of Zenon Dance Company from 2011-2015 and 2017-2019. He holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Maryland, College Park, and is currently Assistant Professor at Bates College and Associate Director of the Young Dancers Intensive at the Bates Dance Festival.
Koepke’s works, including choreographies, films, media design, and large-scale theatrical performances, are dynamic negotiations of creative instinct, desire, somatic historicity, intuition, and intervention. His current research explores speculative masculinities, contemporary gay phenomena, thirst trap fabulation, athletic training techniques, tenderness, relationship anarchy, and gentle camp. Tracing artistic lineage lived and inherited, he weaves wandering strands of silver memory that dissolve into emergent movement tapestries. Ultimately, these poetic explorations culminate in performance-based works that are viscerally compelling, athletic, complex, and spatially-driven, and encourage audiences to engage their own curiosity and ability to interpret meaning from movement, sound, and design.
Works in the exhibition:
Tristan Koepke, Emo$onal Tofu (magenta), 2024, dimensions, sheer mesh, 57” x 114”, headphones play 6:00m sound score
Tristan Koepke, Emo$onal Tofu (blue), 2024, dimensions, sheer mesh, 57” x 114”
Text Created by: Tristan Koepke, in collaboration with MK Ford, with excerpts by Jon Caramanica
Sound Design: Tristan Koepke, with samples from Post Malone
Textile Design: Tristan Koepke, printed by House of U on Recycled Polyester Stretch Mesh
Performance on August 2
Emotional Tofu: Rockland (2024), Emotional Tofu is an iterative multimedia performance project that explores speculative masculinities and the sad boy trope. The work began as a mining of Post Malone’s improvised dance breaks from his most recent live performances, videos of which have proliferated on Social Media. Koepke (a cis-gender gay man) and his collaborator, Emilia Bruno (a trans-masc non-binary soft butch), slowed these choreographies down, developing them as a vehicle to challenge and queer hegemonic narratives and performances of masculinity. They perform Malone’s movement as both tragic, comedic, and in some ways, liberatory, and propose a broad spectrum of masculine expression within the sad boy trope.
The development of Emotional Tofu has been made possible by generous support from SPACE Gallery's 2024 Kindling Fund.
Devised and Directed by: Tristan Koepke
Performed by: Tristan Koepke and Emilia Bruno
Tanja Kunz
Tanja Kunz is a multidisciplinary artist, who’s work explores the healing capacity of art.
Materials like paint, textiles, metals, sound, light, performance and wood are used to materialize the energy, beauty and power of medicine, science and nature. Issues of social and environmental justice are often woven into the work.
Kunz is an artist, maker and grower, currently pursuing an IPHD at the University of Maine in Orono.
Works in the exhibition:
Tanja Kunz, Melt, 2023, 18’ x 18” x 18’ glass case, Ice (rainwater collected during the Summer of 2023), Atlantic sea water, documentation, Images by Alex Turanski
Tanja Kunz, Bloodroot (for Ana Mendieta), 2024, need photo dimensions, framed photo documentation by Dr. Josephine Conte and Nicholas Heller
Kristina Loring
Kristina Loring is a story editor, sound artist, and audio producer, who works across genre and form to create media experiences that you feel in your body. She was the Head of Audio at Dipsea, a feminist audio erotica app, for four years. Before that, she created the interactive cooking show Cooking By Ear that invited listeners into the homes of celebrity guests to chat in the interstices of making a recipe.
Using hands-on installations and interactive performance to bring the audio to life, her work blends documentary-style interviews, field recordings, and fiction writing to foster connection, intimacy, and new emotional realms for listeners to explore.
Performance on August 18
PUNK ANGEL
Heather Lyon is an artist and educator living off the grid in rural Maine, USA. Her work is a visual and movement-based inquiry into the sublime. She uses site-responsive performance, video and installation to investigate the inter-weaving of relationships through gestures of coded communication and embodiment practices. She is a lifelong student of transcendental meditation and indigenous mystical traditions. She holds a BFA (2002) and MFA (2004) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has recently been exhibited and performed at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine, IMRC Center, University of Maine Orono, Orono, Maine, TEDx Dirigo, Portland, Maine, The Danforth Gallery, University of Maine Augusta, Cynthia Winings Gallery, Blue Hill, Maine, Space Gallery, Portland, Maine, Zaratan, Lisbon, Portugal, “The Picnic Pavilion” a parallel project to the 58th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, The State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia and at Artisterium 10, Tbilisi, Georgia, for which she received an Emergency Artist Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York.
Works in the exhibition:
Heather Lyon, Parnassius mnemosyne (sibyl) Video 19:00, 2024, Filmed in collaboration with misael soto in the Parco Nazionale dei Monti Sibillini, Italy
Heather Lyon, Woven Sign, 2024, sign, industrial tape, rope
Heather Lyon, Parnassius mnemosyne (Sibyl) Cloak, 2024, fabric, rope
This work was created in the Parco Nazionale dei Monti Sibillini this past June, during a residency that I created and led, hosted by the International Center for the Arts in Umbria, Italy. The footage was filmed in collaboration with misael soto on Monte Sibilla on the summer solstice, in the Gola dell'Infernaccio, and the Nera River whose source is the Sibillini mountains. I felt compelled to listen and engage with the more than human beings of this particular landscape, and the mythology held within its rivers, mountains, caves and inhabitants. What emerged from these encounters combines my interest in textiles, embodied movement and altered states of consciousness as invitations to connection.
Thalassa Raasch is a French American artist, educator, and beekeeper based in Maine and Iowa. Photographs ground their work and are often accompanied by audio, projections, or other materials to explore perceptual boundaries, translation, and loss. Their creative research has included blind photography, traditional gravedigging, and closed-eye hallucinations.
Work in the exhibition:
Thalassa Raasch, Untitled, 2024, 2015, grid of 31 framed, embossed inkjet prints, about 10.5’ x 6’
During a three-hour performance in May of 2015, I invited blind-folded strangers to “please, feel my face.” With my eyes closed I made a sequence of photographs cued by touch rather than vision. At the time, I was making work exploring alternate sensory experiences. Now, I realize that these were also made in a moment of staggering grief after the death of three close family members. This installation, made in 2024, is hung in a chronology of the thirty-one unique encounters from the original performance. They are portraits of unseen knowing, an ask to be held together and—in the holding—let go. Today, it also serves as a monument to a sort of trust, touch, and intimate exchange among strangers that is no longer the same.
Julie Poitras Santos
Artist, curator, and writer Julie Poitras Santos’s transdisciplinary work connects ecological thinking and earth science disciplines with immersive aesthetic experience and community engagement. Her site-specific work takes the shape of video, installation, and public projects. The relationship between site, story and mobility fuels her research and production, investigating the relationship between natural histories and individual story; walking as a form of listening to site; and material agency in an age of climate change. Poitras Santos has an enduring interest in cross-disciplinarity for its potential to inspire new ways of thinking, and provoke new perspectives on place and time.
Poitras Santos’s work has been exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally, at Portland Museum of Art, ME; Bates College Art Museum, ME; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, ME; Queens Museum, NY; Karlskrona Konsthall, Sweden; CCCB Barcelona, Spain; and Museum of
Contemporary Art Denver, CO, among others. Her writing has been published in Brooklyn Rail, The Chart, Living Maps Review, and Performance Art Journal. She served as Director of Exhibitions at the ICA at MECA&D from 2019-2023 and has taught in the MFA program at Maine College of Art & Design since 2010.
Work in the exhibition:
Julie Poitras Santos, Drift & Light, 2024, photographic wall text, 6’ x 13’
The rhythm of walking creates subtle shifts and connections between the foot and the ground, revealing moments of compaction, friction, and displacement; soil is kicked up, eroded by steps, stuck to our feet, moved by water, buoyed by wind. Walking traces a living exchange with the land. In the Medieval era, Christian pilgrims followed the path of the Milky Way to the shrine of Saint James in Spain, looking to the stars to locate themselves in a heavenly parallel to the earthly pathways they inscribed. Drift & Light considers this mirrored participation, enacting a form of dialogue between sky and land.
Image of Milky Way Galaxy, credit: European Southern Observatory/B, La Sila, Babak Tafreshi. Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License.
Merrilee Schoen, Rori Smith, Augusta Sparks
Merrilee Schoen is an interdisciplinary artist whose work draws from a variety of methods and mediums ranging from sculpture, jewelry, writing, and installation, to socially engaged art practices. Merrilee works with rust, glass, found objects and discards from abandoned sites and vacant lots. Merrilee uses art-making and writing to co-construct community projects, reflected through decades-long work in human rights advocacy and current frontline work in rural mutual aid projects.
Rori Smith is an improvisational dancer and researcher of bodily experience. Rori uses somatic movement practices and performance art to investigate, with a particular interest in the relationships between touch, time and the perception of material. Her work is rooted in feminist theory and new materialism. She holds an MFA in Dance from Temple University and is a doctoral candidate in Art and Philosophy at University of Maine. In day-to-day life, Rori works as a somatic movement educator, supporting others in developing greater awareness of how their unique body moves.
Inspired by the constructs of storytelling, Augusta Sparks generates a library of sculptures and gestural imagery to assemble installations. She is informed by light, shadow and the landscape, as she is a fifth generation photographer. She researches her own and other’s relationship to sense making in a creative process. Sense making is an enacted thinking practice, which requires listening and walking with ambiguity. As an artist, sense making uses a foundational studio practice to comprehend and to form art making. Holding the theoretical in one hand and materiality in the other, Sparks teaches Cellulose Nanofiber workshops that are andragogical to promote activism and sense making.
Work in the exhibition:
Rori Smith, Merrilee Schoen, Augusta Sparks, A Lively Deterioration of Generative Tension, 2024, Thread, twine, reclaimed building materials, mirror, pigment, cellulose nanofiber, moving body, bowls, dust, water, dimensions variable
Thread, twine, reclaimed building materials, mirror, pigment, cellulose nanofiber, moving body, bowls, dust, water
Inspired by water’s capacity to accumulate and disintegrate matter, and through a shared practice of embodied making, the collaborative invites you to witness a process of building with what changes.
Throughout the exhibition the collaborative will alter the installation, instigating generative tensions between dissolution and reformation. Sculptural augmentations by Augusta Sparks and Merrilee Schoen will occur in between performances enacted by Rori Smith on August 2nd and 18th.
Heather Sincavage
Heather Sincavage is an artist, curator, educator, and researcher. Her creative practice centers on the experience of intimate partner violence, its ramifications for victims, and the somatics of negotiating PTSD.
Her performance work has been screened in the Tate Modern in London and projected on the Daniels and Fisher historic bell tower in downtown Denver, Co. She performed at the Queens Museum and Grace Exhibition Space in NYC; Tempting Failure Festival of Performance Art & Noise in London, Alive at Satellite during Miami Art Basel; Latvian Center for Performance Art in Riga; and galleries across the United States. She has exhibited in over 40 solo and group exhibitions across the United States, Germany, Sweden, Spain, Finland, and Iceland.
Originally from Southeastern Pennsylvania, she received her BFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and her MFA from School of Art, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. She is an alumna of The Vermont Studio Center and numerous other residencies and fellowships in the United States and throughout Europe. Her work has been published in Surface Design Journal and the 2022 publication “An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Performance Art: SELF/S” by Dr. T.J. Bacon for the University of Chicago Press.
In 2018, Heather received the Tanne Foundation Award, a peer-nominated honor for scholarship excellence and emergent contributions to the performance art field. She currently is an Associate Professor of Art and the Director of the Sordoni Art Gallery at Wilkes University.
Works in the exhibition:
Heather Sincavage, Inescapable Presence, 2022, performance video, 4:04m
Heather Sincavage, Inescapable Presence [performance relic], 2022, crocheted yarn, dimensions variable, Crocheted “granny squares” were made by over 30 makers in support of those who have either experienced or supported those who have suffered from intimate partner violence. Makers were from across the country, including several from Maine, as well as Canada and the UK.
About the work: Abuse happens usually within the home and without a community. Historically, women have built communities through common interests. As a culture, we recognize sewing circles which were gatherings of mostly women who regularly meet for the purpose of sewing, particularly for charitable causes. Intimate Partner Violence {IPV} isolates victims from others. What an IPV victim lacks is a community.
Inescapable Presence is a durational performance intervention that addresses the ever-presence of intimate partner violence (IPV). As someone who has experienced IPV, I use myself and my experiences as a case study to disclose the ongoing ramifications of abuse. For me, recognizing I was in a precarious situation took some time to realize. I kept the emotional manipulation, gaslighting, and physical altercations private. Once I was able to become self-aware enough that this was not a healthy situation, I asked for help from a few close friends who knew “us” as a couple. This fell on deaf ears when I was not believed, and thus felt abandoned, helpless, and isolated. That reality is a common one as 1 in 4 women experience IPV throughout their lifetime.
Meg Wolfe is a neuroqueer, interdisciplinary artist, dance-maker and landscape gardener, based in Deer Isle, Maine since 2019. In Maine she has shown work at SPEEDWELL Contemporary (Portland); The Cannery (Penobscot); Opera House Arts Harbor Residency (Stonington), Reversing Falls Sanctuary (Brooksville); and Maine Moves (Portland). She lived in Los Angeles from 2004-2019; during that time her choreographic work was commissioned by REDCAT, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art/Time Based Art Festival, DiverseWorks Houston, and National Performance Network. She appeared in CA at the New Original Works Festival, the FRESH Festival, Confusion is Sex #3, Luis de Jesus Gallery, Bootleg Theater, Off Center Festival, Sea and Space Explorations, Highways Performance Space, Queer Planet, and others. Wolfe was the founding director of Show Box L.A.; running the organization from 2009-2020. She created and directed the studio residency project we live in space (2016-20). She curated and produced numerous dance events - from the monthly roving low tech Anatomy Riot series (2006-12) to fully produced works by local and guest artists. She was a founding co-editor of itch dance journal (2006-13). In 2018 she was rehearsal director and performer for a retrospective of Sylvia Palacios Whitman for the Pacific Standard Time Festival. Awards include support from the National Performance Network Creation Fund and Forth Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, Center for Cultural Innovation and Durfee Foundation ARC Grants, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants, Cultural Trailblazers Award from The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, CHIME, the Danspace Project Commissioning Initiative and Meet the Composer; and by residencies at REDCAT, the Djerassi Resident Artist’s Program, Performance Works NorthWest, and UCLA World Arts & Culture/Dance Hothouse Residency, among others. Based in New York City from 1992-2004, Wolfe’s early works were presented in NYC venues such as Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s, Dia Center for the Arts, The Kitchen, The Living Theater, Movement Research at Judson Church, Nuyorican Poets Café, White Box Gallery, and others. She has danced in the works of Vicky Shick, Clarinda Mac Low, Susan Rethorst, Jerome Bel, and others.
Works in the exhibition:
Meg Wolfe, Ice Monster, 2023, 9:33 mins, performance video
Meg Wolfe, Cloud Planet / Storm Warning, 2024, approx 48 x 72,” tulle, assorted applique, lace, trim, ribbon, cord, beads
Meg Wolfe, Cloud Planet / Monster’s Home, 2024, approx 48 x 54”, tulle, assorted applique, lace, trim, ribbon, cord, fringe
My works seek to order, direct, and sublimate the messy potential of our bodies as energetic reverberation stations. Mapping the space between holding all that is going on and the place where things fall apart, my performances, objects, films, and paintings enact non-narrative sensory experiences, both intimate and epic.
Ranging through hyper-focused structure and chaos, sparseness and lushness, the pieces and conceptual series that I make reveal and assert my perceptual lens and lived history as a neuroqueer interdisciplinary dance artist and community builder. With 30+ years of making work and nurturing community in Los Angeles and New York City prior to moving to Deer Isle, Maine in 2019, I think/sense/make through an extended process roving across media, spaces, and practices that remain choreographic and intuitive at their core. Since 2020, my practical vocation of gardener/landscaper has operated as an expansive facet of my creative practice. Physically tangible, ever-shifting, sensory, breathing, time-based, site-specific, this activity is a human and non-human elemental collaboration with regenerative potential. It’s all moving.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:
The Performance Art Initiative is pleased to announce their inaugural exhibition of performance base works opening July 19. In the Room by the Ocean brings together thirteen artists with ties to Maine that engage performance as part of their ongoing creative practice. The exhibition features a range of works including video, performance-based photography, text, installations, and objects used in or resulting from artistic actions. Addressing themes related to the environment, identity, trauma, mysticism, body, space, materiality, and the everyday, the exhibition highlights current ideas and methods of working that artists are exploring now to offer a close look at performance's important role in contemporary art in Maine.
In the Room by the Ocean includes new and recent works by Bri Bowman, Isabel Hunter, Tristan Koepke, Tanja Kunz, Kristina Loring, Heather Lyon, Thalassa Raasch, Julie Poitras Santos, Merrilee Schoen, Rori Smith, Augusta Sparks, Heather Sincavage, and Meg Wolfe. The exhibition will be accompanied by live performances on the opening day of July 19 as well as on Rockland’s First Friday, August 2, and will conclude with a closing reception including performances by five of the exhibition artists on August 18 from 3-6pm.
Schedule of Performances:
August 2, 5 - 8pm
Tristan Koepke
Rori Smith
August 18, 3 - 6pm
Isabel Hunter
Kristina Loring
Heather Sincavage
Heather Lyon
Rori Smith
ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE ART INITIATIVE:
The Performance Art Initiative supports exposure, development, exhibition opportunities and audience engagement for Maine-based artists working in performance. Founded in 2023 by Patricia Brace and Bethany Engstrom, in consultation with artist Deborah Wing-Sproul, PAI is an artist-led collaborative effort that facilitates a deeper, more diverse dialogue of performance art in Maine. PAI’s goal is to create a community for performance artists while serving as a resource, providing opportunities for expansion and sharing of the medium through rich dialogue around performance-based work. This includes the development of exhibitions, Performance Exchange, an online presence, panels, and workshops, where performance art is the primary medium. PAI collaborates with both emerging and established artists with a focus on interdisciplinary and varied approaches to community engagement and outreach.