Arts

Wallace Shawn’s dialogue in Lorem Ipsum's mouth

You keep using that word
Pedestrians passing the window of Rose Contemporary gallery last weekend might have wondered what several leering, expensively dressed people were up to inside.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 23, 2013

Nostalgic memoir celebrates Drinking with Men

Raise a glass
Every few years, the bar cars on Metro-North Railroad's New Haven line (which leads from New York City's Grand Central Station into Connecticut) become endangered by modern-day Puritans who believe commuter trains are inappropriate venues for after-work cocktails. Can you imagine?!

By: DEIRDRE FULTON | May 23, 2013

Jack Sell displays his results at 3 Fish

Abstract experiments
You might look at John R. Sell, a Gray resident and part-time Downeaster, as a painter with a secret.

By: NICHOLAS SCHROEDER | May 23, 2013

PMA show highlights MoMA’s influence

Defining the canon
It's a peculiarly American irony that the same man who basically invented the advertising model for the business of broadcasting radio and later television would have amassed a significant collection of modernist art.

By: KEN GREENLEAF | May 16, 2013

Andy Verzosa’s re-thinking at Aucocisco

Changing parameters
Owner and director Andres Verzosa is showing 13 three-day two-person shows this season. Verzosa is perfectly aware of the disappearance of hierarchy and authority that I would maintain is not only taking place in the art world, but has already happened in art criticism and publishing.

By: BRITTA KONAU | May 09, 2013

Thoughtful laughs in Wittenberg

Hamlet's salad days
Much has been made of Prince Hamlet's exhausting philosophical indecision. To be or not? To kill or not? He has a hell of a time figuring it out, when he should be happily ensconced in college life back in Wittenberg.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 09, 2013

James Marshall escapes flatness at icon

Leaping off the wall
In the first show of the season at the always engaging Icon Contemporary Art, James Marshall's collection of new works breathes life into the paper bag. Literally.

By: NICHOLAS SCHROEDER | May 03, 2013

Twelve Maine plays in Acorn’s festival

Homegrown dozen
It's time once again for Acorn Productions' annual celebration of the playwrights living among us.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | May 03, 2013

Designtex staffers strut their stuff at SPACE

Workplace creativity
"Surface Tension," the fantastic exhibit at SPACE Gallery, is a gorgeous set of oddities, surfaces, and structures, and issues a strong challenge to visual perception using remarkable techniques re-imagining the limits of texture, conception, and color.

By: NICHOLAS SCHROEDER | April 24, 2013

A surreal comedy from Dramatic Rep

Fins to the left, fins to the right
Life is in upheaval for these four friends, and all of them will need to go deep to make sense of things in Swimming in the Shallows , a comedy with a touch of the surreal, by Adam Bock.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 24, 2013

Woolf’s Orlando on stage at USM

Shifting time and gender
Insights into both the masculine and the feminine are at the center of Virginia Woolf's Orlando , a fabulist commentary on the fluidity of gender and sexual identity.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 25, 2013

Stop making sense

The implied narratives of Per Kirkeby
The current show by the highly-acclaimed Danish artist Per Kirkeby at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is a broad survey of his work, with examples of his paintings and sculpture from the 1960s up to a few years ago.

By: KEN GREENLEAF | April 17, 2013

Small scale yields big impact

Little drawings deliver deeper truths
Medieval towns, towers and turrets, flocks of birds, and blazing fires could easily be the subjects of fairytales or kitsch. Not so in the hands of Dozier Bell, who has plunged deeply into her imagination and masterfully realized what she found there in visual terms.

By: BRITTA KONAU | April 18, 2013

Carolyn Gage’s new short plays give women voice

Speaking out of silence
Women's experience of slavery, genocide, and cultural oppression, says playwright Carolyn Gage, is very different than men's: Sexual violence and women's ability to give birth makes them subject to a particularly penetrating form of colonization. And even the best-intentioned histories, she adds, often try to "disappear" that difference.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 10, 2013

Small scale, big impact

Little drawings deliver deeper truths
Medieval towns, towers and turrets, flocks of birds, and blazing fires could easily be the subjects of fairytales or kitsch. Not so in the hands of Dozier Bell.

By: BRITTA KONAU | April 10, 2013

Looking for Love(1)

In all the right vignettes of Cariani’s new play
A man and a woman in a Walmart-type store are driven into each other's arms by their Obsessive Impulsive disorder. A man has a condition that keeps him from hearing the words "I love you" from his new lover. A woman with a wife and young child searches desperately through the garage for something she's lost — herself.

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | April 04, 2013

UNE’s Women Pioneers deepen inquiry

Joining disunity
Third of four in the UNE Art Gallery's series of Maine Women Pioneers, the curators describe "Worldview" as an exhibit of artists "who are connected to their world . . . inspired by ethics, emotions, and existential holistic themes, as activists, healers, and visionaries." That's a definition with a pretty broad reach

By: NICHOLAS SCHROEDER | April 04, 2013

Inside the bellies of the beasts at ICA at MECA

Species Going Distinct
Harbored inside walls of burlap cloth draped from the ceiling of the ICA's darkened back room comes the terrific pull of "Bump," the impressive installation of suspended whale bones found and arranged into a sort of mausoleum by Maine brothers Frank and Dan DenDanto.

By: NICHOLAS SCHROEDER | March 27, 2013

AIRE, starring the McCourt brothers

Quite a pair
The autobiographical two-man show they co-wrote and performed, A Couple of Blaguards, is onstage now starring the marvelous Paul Haley and Tony Reilly

By: MEGAN GRUMBLING | March 27, 2013

Marking mud time in Portland galleries

An afternoon’s wander
Galleries tend to hunker down for the annual Maine economic recession, and are more or less vamping until full spring. Which is OK, since they are often picking from gallery inventory, and they have some good things.

By: KEN GREENLEAF | March 20, 2013