FARMINGTON, ME (January 28, 2019)—The University of Maine at Farmington’s dynamic Art on Campus Project is bringing the creative work of two new emerging artists to the UMF campus during the 2019 spring semester.
The work of Jeanette May, a photo-based artist, and Patrick Casey, an artist who specializes in print-based work, will be on display in the UMF Mantor Library and the Emery Community Arts Center from Tuesday, Feb. 5, through Saturday, May 11. The exhibits are free and open to the public.
May uses a critical, sometimes playful, approach to investigate representation itself. Early training as a painter is evident in her carefully arranged compositions and rich color palette. May “makes” photographs: constructed, staged, lit, and carefully considered. Her recent still life project, “Tech Vanitas,” confronts the anxiety surrounding technological obsolescence.
She has been awarded grants, fellowships, and residencies from the NEA Regional Artists’ Projects Fund, Brooklyn Arts Council, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Illinois Arts Council, Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and Ms. Foundation.
Her work is exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including New York; Washington, DC; Chicago; Los Angeles; Toronto, Canada; Sandviken, Sweden; and Athens, Greece. May teaches at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York City and lives in Brooklyn.
Casey creates speculative narratives in woodcut that explore who we are in the age of the internet and imagine what we may become as the dawn of the posthuman era approaches. He is interested in the surge of relationships with technology and the recession of face-to-face interaction.
He draws from the traditions of printmaking, punk, zine culture, science fiction and fandom, seeing each as a prime example of print media’s democratising nature, each with their own subculture rich in community, ephemera, shared knowledge and specific language.
In his work, translucent layers of ink and both varied and repetitious mark-making make for imagery that feels naturally evolved, as if these entire worlds are made of the same stuff. Sometimes the grain of the wood flows through the image, sometimes it is a red-shifting wavelength or a corrupted signal, each one referencing the real-world systems used to communicate and hopefully hinting at other hidden wave patterns made visible.
His work has been shown nationally and internationally. Casey has instructed printmaking courses at The University of Iowa, the Iowa City Press Co-op, the Summer Studio Art Program at Skidmore College, and most recently at Lesley University and Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
The Art on Campus program is sponsored by the UMF President’s Office and the H. King & Jean Cummings Charitable Fund of the Maine Community Foundation. Artists are selected by a committee of UMF art faculty and university staff.
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Media Contact: Sarah Maline, UMF associate professor of art history, maline@maine.edu
EDITOR’S NOTE:
Image: RP189-030A
Photo Caption: Jeanette May
Photo Credit: Submitted Image
Image: RP189-030B
Photo Caption: Patrick Casey
Photo Credit: Submitted Image
April Mulherin
UMF Associate Director for Media Relations
office: 207-778-7081
cell: 207-491-0064
april.mulherin@maine.edu