Two shows up through early April ask us to reconsider the plurality of possible meanings behind the concepts of “euphoria” and “home.”
At Alice Gauvin Gallery, the artist couple Ryan and Rachel Gloria Adams have curated a pop-up exhibition titled “Euphoria” (through April 2). Their choices make plain that what elicits, according to Miriam Webster, “a feeling or state of intense excitement or happiness” is highly subjective.
The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design presents “Journey Around My Room” (through April 9), which will surprise – and at times possibly discomfit – viewers, as it rarely hews to the treacly old adage “Home Sweet Home.” Instead, it questions our nurturing assumptions about the sanctuary and sanctity of home.
For “Euphoria,” the Adamses prompted 17 artists, plus themselves, to respond to the definition of euphoria as explained above. All but two created new work for the show. It won’t surprise many that the first impression as one pans the room is of unbridled, eye-popping color. There’s nary a monochromatic work on the walls. But as we begin to consume the art on view, what becomes clear is that euphoria takes infinite forms.
Right away, for instance, we get the beautiful, yet restrained work of Will Sears. A naturally softspoken and quiet person, Sears finds joy in structure and order, two characteristics not usually associated with euphoria. But as we sit with his work, we begin to intuit the profound pleasures of exacting mathematical construction, and a meticulous (dare I say obsessive?) coloring and assembling of minute wood parts as tiny as tesserae.
Or there are the Adamses’ own works. Rachel Gloria’s is a pattern-based abstraction of flower petals floating in water that commemorates the intimate sibling bond she witnessed during a nautical celebration of life ceremony for the family matriarch. The painting represents new territory for this artist, the fluid yet consistently pattern-based beauty of which moves – movingly – from a focus on decoration to an exploration of depth.
The embedded message of Ryan’s black-on-black painting is “Beat the Odds.” This might seem a pale consolation prize for actual euphoria. But as a Black artist – or simply a Black man living in contemporary America – it feels like an ebullient achievement. That should give us all pause.
Our more familiar concept of euphoria, however, is well represented in many works. The one-name Portland-based artist Chel contributes a jubilantly abstract expressionist composition whose excitement of color, gesture and line seems to burst forth from the canvas. In Biddeford artist Hannah Hirsch’s “Afterglow,” the lingering euphoria of lovemaking is so uncontrollable that it cannot even be contained in a single shaped canvas, but splits off, like cells ecstatically replicating themselves, into smaller auxiliary paintings that are nevertheless unmistakably connected to the larger work.
Leon Benn, without a doubt one of Portland’s most talented and imaginative recent arrivals, offers “Ancient Future,” a hallucinatory painting that looks like Yves Tanguy on mushrooms. The Tanguy reference is not arbitrary. Though Tanguy’s surrealist paintings dealt mostly with sea forms, the composition of “Ancient Future” resembles Tanguys’s “Mama, Papa Is Wounded.” But in Benn’s work, it looks like nature has tripped (literally) into a state of such wild intoxication that it is showing off most shamelessly, with psychedelic Northern Lights and a heat that emanates so intensely off the surface that it threatens to scald the viewer. To paraphrase Estelle Reiner, director Rob Reiner’s mother in the famous orgasm scene of the 1989 comedy “When Harry Met Sally,” I’ll have what he’s having.
There is the euphoria that springs from the fearlessness of youth and its blustery naiveté (Holden Willard’s painting of bird-flipping, tattoo-exposing, inebriated buds); erotic euphoria (Bee Daniel’s lesbian kiss against a background of floral fertility); the euphoria induced by extreme activities (Kelly Rioux’s watery blue tripartite composition referencing the transporting and healing power of cold-water swimming during the Alzheimer’s demise of a relative), and on and on.
Works will or will not resonate with you depending on how closely aligned you are with each artist’s view of the transformational state of the show’s title. But in the end what comes through is how personal and unique each individual’s experience of euphoria can be.
[Excerpted from full review]