The Skowhegan Alliance is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works Skowhegan Alumni made during the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic. Juried by Xinyi Cheng (A'14), Yui Kugimiya (A'10), and Jagdeep Raina (A'17), this is the first exhibition of its kind to be organized by Skowhegan.

The works in this exhibition embody a unique combination of paintings, drawings, sculptures, video, installation, and photography that grapples with building a new visual language in order to come to terms with understanding the strange new world we have all individually and collectively found ourselves in. A curiosity with listening to what's shaped the day to day lives of these artists—where time seems to have become compressed and the outside world becomes more intangible with the digital inside—are at the core of the psychologically charged works that are being presented. Whether it is the figurativeness, the tactility of material, the traces of hands, or the subject matter and daily life, these artists prod away at what it means to stitch together the threads of vulnerability that the world has suddenly been exposed to; a vulnerability that has rarely been shared before in such a global state. 


But coming to terms with this current reality also forces us to deal with the inevitable longing for a world long disappearing into memory. It is this delicate balancing act where time collapses and the past, present, and future become blurred that these artists embrace so fearlessly in these presented works; a blurring that also allows us to see that the things in our lives that were once so mundane, familiar, and taken for granted are suddenly being acknowledged. Yet, these artists don't just force us to see this acknowledgement, but also teach us how to compassionately confront the unknown every single day, no matter what kind of state we continue to find ourselves in.

Text by Jagdeep Raina, image by Yui Kugimiya and Xinyi Cheng over Zoom 

 

Click 𐁉 icons for more information. // Some works have multiple images; navigate with < > buttons on top. // Best on desktop, full screen.

𐀀.

Amanda Lechner

Sitting in discomfort

2020

buon fresco on foam panel

18x12"

𐀁.

Amanda Lechner

Moonage Daydream

2020

buon fresco on foam panel

24x24"

𐀂.

Pallavi Sen

Left:

Onam Pookalam

Summer 2020

A pookalam is traditionally a floral arrangement made on the floor during Onam, a harvest festival in Kerala. In India we celebrate various harvest festivals, and though Onam is not something my family traditionally celebrates (we are not from Kerala), our neighbours did and we celebrated with them. This Onam was particularly meaningful to me as I brought in my first harvest, and also in the painful feeling of celebrating something that makes my very being in a place that is so far away from it, and so far away from anyone who understands this love for this particular festival. The Pookalam is on my living room floor, made of the week's harvest + burdock that grows around the beds.

𐀵.

Pallavi Sen

Right:

Tomato Harmony

Summer 2020

a rangoli / floor drawing of tomatoes I harvested on one of the weeks this summer, from my first garden, before they were distributed the next day. The floor is my living room floor, my home being where the tomatoes were stored between picking and distribution, sometimes to ripen the green blushing ones, and other times for just waiting with them at home which is better than them being bitten by groundhog on the vine.

 

𐀃.

Karishma D'Souza

Leaving

March 2020

monoprint on paper

30 x 63 cm,

A day before the Indian government closed India’s international borders I arrived in Goa from Lisbon. I made it back like a mosquito entering the house with you as the door is closed for the evening!! Some work had been successfully completed and I looked forward to being in a more familiar place again.

𐀄.

Karishma D'Souza

Family Portrait

May-October 2020

oil on canvas

122 x 153 cm

This is a portrait of my mother listening to herself. She sits in our garden, under a Laburnum tree planted by her. The Laburnum sheds its leaves and bursts into flower a month before the monsoon. The changing landscape has a tiled roof house and a building. The hill in the background and the forests are a part of her: She would walk in the forests every weekend each monsoon. This is the first portrait I have done, in a long time, of people close to me, painting them outdoors, in open spaces, partly in reaction to the lock-in, to paint people in particular landscapes they are a part of, but also to begin portraits I’ve wanted to paint for years.

𐀅.

Karishma D'Souza

The Garden and the Sea

March 2020

PDF of images made with the phone during an online meeting with friends

In the first week of the lock-in in Goa, Nash organised an online meeting calling it a Crafternoon session. This PDF incorporates a memory of Nash’s, Divya’s and Jonathan’s projects, Divya was working on a pinhole camera, Nash on a collage and Jonathan made a clay elephant. The PDF ends with a reference to T. S Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ‘..Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’

𐀆.

Brian Zegeer

Kitchen Garden

2020

4 minutes and 50 seconds

Kitchen Garden is a collection of computer-generated animations made during the lockdown, detailing my family’s efforts to cobble together our spring vegetable garden. At the beginning seeds were sold out at the few open stores, and then we were busy isolating after virus exposure. So we planted sprouted potatoes, carrot stubs, seeds gathered from kitchen veggies. The animations themselves reflect this turning inward, as all source material--texture images and so-forth-- originates from within our apartment and back lot. Our intimate space is projected onto the infinite extensibility of the cg environment. Scoring was arranged on my daughter’s educational Ipad, and she lends her voice in some sections.

𐀇.

Brian Zegeer

Now Gnosis

computer-generated animation

10 seconds (infinite loop)

2020

𐀈.

Jon Marshalik

Morning of the Magicians

2020

acrylic and colored sand on canvas over panel

48 x 40 in

𐀉.

Jon Marshalik

Window

2020

acrylic, colored sand, rock, and collage on canvas over panel

48 x 40 in

𐀊.

Kuldeep Singh

The Neo [queer] Rāgamāla paintings are a part of an ecosystem that integrates the emic approach to the study of South Asian music and visual art, along with immersive performance components – in finding inventive ways of representing queer male body, its limbs and parts to plural ecological elements. It aims at blurring the border between body, nature and eventually the spiritual itself. Thus questioning nature of the body, its genesis and defects, as well as systems of knowledge. The works bank on the historic rāgamāla paintings of courtly tradition of Central India (16th to 18th century CE, with their characteristic anthropomorphic representation of musical melodies along with abundant portrayal of nature) as an entry point. But eventually embody a contemporary interpretation of the concept, through a quasi-scientific trajectory with social anthropologist’s quest.

Left:

Euceladona in Raag Kedar

April 2020

oil on canvas

24 x 18 inches

𐀶.

Right:

Kuldeep Singh

Circumnavigating in Raag Yaman

September 2020

oil on canvas

20 x 16 inches

𐀋.

Bully Fae Collins & Jonathan Chacón

Haha Salad: Egg, Vase, Buttplug

10/16/20

Colored pencil on inkjet print

𐀍.

William Leech

Left:

No 1. Fever Dream

July 2020

Graphite on Paper

11" x 14"

Right:

No. 2 Fever Dream

February 2020

Graphite on Paper

11" x 14"

𐀎.

Terry Holleman

Two Lions at Sonoma Coyote

Spring 2020

𐀏.

Maggie Ellis

Hunched Over

2020

ink on paper

𐀐.

Maggie Ellis

Sparrow With Shadows

2020

Watercolor and ink on paper

𐀑.

Esteban del Valle

The End is Near: Happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear...

2020

color pencil on paper

14" x 16.5"

𐀒.

Esteban del Valle

The End is Near: Delayed

2020

color pencil on paper

22" x 17"

𐀓.

Erick Hernandez

Self Portrait in Mask

2020

Oil on Canvas

18 x 24 inches

𐀔.

Erick Hernandez

Platicerio; felt like the whispers of a vanishing hand

2020

Acrylic on Canvas

48 x 60 inches

𐀕.

Julie Ann Nagle

A Wing is a Fin is a Limb

2020

Mirrors, wood, steel, moths, butterflies, beetles, wasps, flies, dragonflies, and other winged creatures.

As this oversized kaleidoscope slowly rotates, reflections of the winged insects at the far end are abstracted to suggest new evolutionary creatures.

𐀖.

Ditta Baron Hoeber

Left:

Drawing Me II

2020

Sequence of three brush and Sumi ink drawings on Bristol paper. 7.5 x 28.5 inches.

𐀷.

Ditta Baron Hoeber

Right:

Handbook

2020

15 Brush and Sumi ink drawings on Bristol paper mounted in 6 x 8 inch accordion book made of Stonehenge paper with Museum board ends and Stonehenge jacket.

𐀗.

Gary LaPointe Jr.

(invisible grid 1-2)

2020

focused sunlight and acrylic on wooden panel

diptych 25 x 16 x 7/8”

The color of this diptych sits between pink insulation foam, the album cover of the 1977 release of NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS here’s the Sex Pistols, and the pages of BUTT magazine, a gay publication that started in the early 2000s. The images are burned from focusing sunlight and are in reference to a technical zig-zag welding pattern; interweaving cultural and marginalized homosexual markers with the focused energy of the sun.

𐀘.

Brian Alfred

LA Trance

LA Trance is an animation made under quarantine with collaboration with Ben Radatz who took photos of an abandoned LA and musician Four Tet.

𐀙.

Kyung Jeon

Coronavirus and Dog Walking

2020

Graphite, watercolor, gouache, Japanese Shizen paper on rice paper on canvas

18 x 24 inches

Coronavirus and Dog Walking takes an everyday scene during the time of the Coronavirus 2020 quarantine and depicts the isolation and loneliness of daily life in the city. The dog owners wear masks and social distance, while watching their dogs. A jogger appears on the bottom with her mask under her chin. The clouds that are cutout and collaged from Japanese Shizen Paper represent the weight of uncertainty.

𐀚.

Kyung Jeon

Coronavirus and Mask Wearing

2020

Graphite, watercolor, gouache, Japanese Shizen paper on rice paper on canvas

18 x 24 inches

Coronavirus and Mask Wearing takes an everyday scene during the time of the Coronavirus 2020 quarantine and depicts the isolation and loneliness of daily life in the city. A child looks out the window, as another child hides under his mother's dress for protection. Garbage sits on the curb as the city's streets are abandoned and a biker rides by. The clouds that are cutout and collaged from Japanese Shizen Paper represent the weight of uncertainty.

𐀛.

Kyung Jeon

Coronavirus and Black Lives Matter

2020

Graphite, watercolor, gouache, Japanese Shizen paper on rice paper on canvas

18 x 24 inches

In the painting titled Coronavirus and Black Lives Matter, the artist Kyung Jeon collected powerful images of protestors demonstrating against police brutality and systemic racism during the time of the coronavirus pandemic and recreates them in this peaceful protest scene. The clouds that are cutout and collaged from Japanese Shizen Paper represent the tear gas used against peaceful protestors."

𐀜.

Farrell Brickhouse

Adrift, Ship of Fools Series

2020

oil on canvas

8" x 10"

Sometimes the brush just seems to know where to go! "Ship of Fools Series", the mast once the tree of knowledge and so we are now all adrift at this moment. Foucault-" Something new appears in the imaginary landscape of the Renaissance; soon it will occupy a privileged place there: the Ship of Fools, a strange "drunken boat" that glides along the calm rivers of the Rhineland and the Flem- ish canals."--and here it all is again floating on the ethers of the internet enabling the foolish and the sinister authors of decline and we're all on the same boat.

𐀝.

Liza Phillips

Cloud Boat

2020

acrylic on canvas

44x60 inches

𐀞.

Liza Phillips

Sublimated

2020

acrylic on canvas

50x78 inches

𐀟.

Lilly McElroy

Because of the pandemic, the spaces that I have access to and am thinking about are much more contained. I am now working from home and spending much more time on my couch. It has stopped being simply a piece of furniture where I safely nap and watch TV. My couch has become the world where so many of my invisible internal dramas take place. I’m using my couch as a symbolic space where I perform gestures that point to the horror and absurdity of our current experience.What happens when you no longer feel comfort? How do you keep yourself and the people you love safe during all of this? How do you stay sane? It seems impossible. My only option was to crawl under the couch cushions and make a photograph.

Left:

Trying To Make Myself Comfortable Using Every Cushion That I Have

2020

Archival Inkjet Print

𐀸.

Lilly McElroy

Center:

Trying To Make Myself Comfortable Under Every Blanket In My House

2020

Archival Inkjet Print

𐀹.

Lilly McElroy

Right:

Still Trying To Make Myself Comfortable

2020

Archival Inkjet Print

𐀠.

Matt Smoak

Bricolage shirt

2020

cotton yukatas, cotton shirts, wood

𐀡.

Eve Sussman

Sudoku Session #5

April 2020

An improv performance from quarantine, in which the performers are also the audience.

Shortly before lockdown I had been working on a dance piece called "Madison Color Theory". Anyone could show up + take part in rehearsal. When meeting in person was no longer possible some of the participants suggested we try to rehearse online.

We found rehearsing the dance together online wholly unsatisfying, and so came up with new protocols and directives to drive an improv based on instructions and responses to the other players in the grid. Like the live dance piece anyone could show up and take part and each meeting rendered a different group of people as the assembly morphed from 3 people in Brooklyn to upwards of 20 signing on from places near and far (New York, Seattle, Berlin, Paris, Athens, Lisbon)

The only constant was that each person appear with a plain colored background + dress in a single color. We did 15 Sudoku Sessions March - August.

𐀢.

Michelle Hauser

Title: MEETING HALL MAINE: COLLECTION OF TWENTY-FOUR FRONT VIEWS OF ACTIVE AND REPURPOSED GRANGE, ODD FELLOWS, MASONIC AND KNIGHTS OF PYTHIAS HALLS

Medium: PHOTOGRAPHS, 24 ARCHIVAL DIGITAL PRINTS

Individual Print Size: 9” x 6.167”

Collective Size unframed approximately: 37” (h) x 36” (w) DATE: 2020

Meeting Hall Maine records for posterity the cultural tides reflected in the documentation of hundreds of meeting halls. These lone structures reflect our time that implores us to be physically distant and refrain from large gatherings. Presented in grids the project showcases a typology of structures, by adhering to direct vantages, frontal, side or back views centered to form a kind of abstraction.

𐀣.

Michelle Hauser

Title: MEETING HALL MAINE: COLLECTION OF NINE SIDE VIEWS OF GRANGE AND MASONIC HALLS

Medium: PHOTOGRAPHS, NINE ARCHIVAL DIGITAL PRINTS

Individual Print Size: 9.5” (w) x 6.5

Collective Size unframed approximately: 20” (h) x 29” (w) x DATE: 2020

Meeting Hall Maine records for posterity the cultural tides reflected in the documentation of hundreds of meeting halls. These lone structures reflect our time that implores us to be physically distant and refrain from large gatherings. Presented in grids the project showcases a typology of structures, by adhering to direct vantages, frontal, side or back views centered to form a kind of abstraction.

𐀥.

Avantika Bawa

A Pink Scaffold in the Rann, Kutch, India (Part 1)

45.5’x32’x40’ (HxWxD), Painted scaffolds. Dec 2019 - Early March 2020

A Pink Scaffold in the Rann, is the third installation of the ‘Scaffold Series’. Here scaffolds are transformed into an object of beauty through the color pink and the location of the salt desert, thus ceasing to be an object of function. With A Pink Scaffold in the Rann, I build yet another scaffold that highlights the beauty of the vast landscape, its location by an international border, and its current state of flux due to climate change, in a way that is visually impactful and conceptually powerful.

𐀤.

Avantika Bawa

A Pink Scaffold in the Rann, Kutch, India (Part 2a)

38’x 55’x50’ (HxWxD), Painted scaffolds, End March 2020 - August 2020

Somewhere in the vastness of the Rann of Kutch stands the second iteration of the ‘Pink Scaffold’.

My friends/collaborators at Agrocel reinstalled this end February in a more open and infinite location than the first, with much less foot traffic.

Why?

Because we wanted to let the work and landscape be more in tune with each other, allowing the occasional spectator an experience that was more powerful due to the one-on-one experience. The landscape, the work and the lone viewer. A few individuals got to experience this and I hear it was sublime.

The plan was to deinstall it by end March when the land gets softer and the work can start to erode.

But then the pandemic struck.

And The Pink Scaffold still stands, in solitude and solidarity. Watching, waiting and hoping.

𐀦.

Mark Ferguson

Untitled

2020

graphite and color pencil on synthetic paper

12"x12"

𐀨.

Daniel Rich

Midtown, NYC

2020

Acrylic on Dibond

78.75 x 55 inches / 200 x 140 cm.

𐀩.

Elisa Harkins

Pony During Pandemic

For the past year I have been working with a dancer based in Montreal, Canada and a dancer based in Stockholm, Sweden. We have collaboratively been working on a dance piece called Radio III. The works in Radio III feature music composed by me and some songs are in the Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek) languages. We have been figuring out new ways of working with each other under the circumstances and performed "Pony" from Radio III via Zoom for PICA's TBA Festival.

The lyrics for Pony are in English and in Muscogee (Creek).

lyrics

Rodeo

Rolling like a star

Corotke
(Crippled)

Cuko-essiyv
(Painter)

Dream away

Did you tell a story

Honece
(Wild)

Ue-home-eskv
(Whisky Drinker)

When they come at night, I ride away

Hoktet rakkon ohlikes
(A woman is riding a horse)

𐀪.

Joan Steinman

Portrait of an Artist and His Dog Bosch

2020, 48x48, Acrylic on Canvas

𐀫.

Joan Steinman

Red Umbrella II

2020, 36x48, Acrylic on Canvas

𐀬.

Nancy Modlin Katz

Come and Play

May- June 2020

Porcelain,underglaze,glaze

5.5"x 4.75"x 3"

Porches were a safe place to play, read and watch those passing by. Two young children, at a distance, seem not to understand the changing world. Play must continue.

 

𐀭.

Felipe Steinberg

Not I, Not Here, video for browser, sound, 3 min (loop).

VIDEO LINK FOR MOBILE

Those weeks at home became an endless space of receiving and forwarding messages of the current situation, as much as it became a space where different forms of interpersonal communication erupted. Having in mind the current disembodiment of the voice through the occlusion of the mask, and by looking at Samuel Becket's play “Not I” (1972), the work presented here takes the form of an epiphany. Different contents (texting, Whatsapp and emails) - that were shared privately with me - from different sources were collapsed into one. If it was imagined that the Internet would have a great emancipatory potential by allowing a breakdown of the authority of those who speak, eventually reducing the power of manipulation of the cultural industry, the advent of it might actually represent a radical rupture between the transmission and reception of the message, where the the origin of the information has lost its relevance.

FOR THE TEXT OF THE VIDEO PLEASE CLICK HERE

 

𐀮.

Mark Haddon

The Well, People Explore a Submerged Forest in 1810.

2020

Ink on paper

5 feet by 9 feet (150cm high by 270cm)

The work shows a group of indigenous Californians coming out of a submerged forest to discover Krishna and Radha by a well. All the drawing emerges from the well.

A note on key sources in the drawing: The image of Radha and Krishna taken from a painting in the Gita Govinda Set, Kangra, Late 18th Century and found in the Gujarat Museum in Ahmedabad. Image of Native Californians (possibly Muwekma Ohlone Tribe) at the Mission of St Joseph (San Jose) about 1804 is taken from a print by the Russian naturalist GH Von Langsdorff in his account of his journeys in North America between 1803 and 1805: Voyages and Travels in Various Parts of the World.

𐀯.

Sue Collier

Left:

Migrants

2019-2020

Color Pencil on Print Paper

48" x 96"

This most recent drawing of Migrants expresses the current world-wide condition of migration fraught with horror and the lack of humanity it gives rise to. How much distance will they have travelled from their own lives and how far do they have to go to reclaim part of their lives back again? And will they know when they have arrived? Deprivation creates shame and humiliation, the loss of power and dignity, intimacy and privacy. We are dehumanized all of us when some of us are treated this way. We climb into flimsy, crowded boats and cross impossible bodies of water, sacrificing all we know and understand to take a risky ride, hoping to survive.

𐀺.

Sue Collier

Right:

Perilous Walk Home

1918-2020

Triptych Oil on Canvas

50" x 168"

A Perilous Walk Home is a dark painting, a dark story that has been with me since childhood. Covid has allowed me the rare, consistent, and introspective time to work I needed to tell this story. Size was important because it gave me distance and I was painting an experience where I had to recreate the house, yard and neighborhood from memory. Within the painting each figure’s place matters because they rely on the other, yet none are confident. Facial expressions mattered because fear, anger, love, innocence, trust coalesce and strain against the possible violence.

𐀰.

Jack Hogan

Keepers

2020

My narration in this video considers increased enclosure, happening even in advance of this year's pandemic, what to keep from the old days, and what to discard. I want to reject the frictionless market and corporate control of socializing, via private space online and in person, that reduces interclass contact conducted in a mode of good will. But I want to keep the newfound refocus on the local in 2020, as the political form of the international; in Huey Newton’s terms, the local as the condition for intercommunalism. I also want to keep the oft-trivialized revolutionary value of imagination that many have re-engaged during the pandemic, via mutual aid, self-organization, direct action and voluntary association. And I want to maintain the pursuit of a collective capacity to produce, care and enjoy, practiced amidst awareness of our participation in a system that brutalizes us and privatizes survival. This is what Herbert Marcuse calls “images of a gratification that would destroy the society that suppresses it”; spectres of societies that could be free.

𐀲.

Kunlin He

Half-Luna Dome

2019

golden acrylic drawing on three difference layers (bottom: aluminum, middle: mylar, top: acrylic sheet)

72(L) X 48(W) inch

Note This painting is the one of painting in my project “2092: Tale of Moon Trip”.

𐀳.

Ann Oren

Blue

How to overcome the locked-in syndrome of the computer screen? A meditative reflection on the urban jungle with the color blue as the main protagonist. BLUE is a part of Ann Oren’s video journals, a short video series responding to media culture and Instagram specifically with the square format, often starring animals.

𐀴.

Hadrien Gerenton

City Hall

2020

oil on linen

48x32cm