In Kittery and York, lovers of art have starkly different shows to choose from ‘Parts & Wholes’ is at the George Marshall Store Gallery in York and ‘Yoav Horesh: The Village’ is at Buoy in Kittery.
Sep 8, 2024
by Jorge S. Arango
Maine’s southernmost towns, Kittery and York, are hosting two exhibitions that could hardly be more different. One is mostly about painting (“Parts & Wholes,” through Sept. 29 at the George Marshall Store Gallery) and is filled with brushy verve and bright color; the other (“Yoav Horesh: The Village,” through Oct. 5 at Buoy) is black-and-white photography and quietly melancholic and pensive.
“Parts & Wholes” is a charming and wonderfully hung show. Curator Toby Gordon asked nine artists to create a collection of works that, when viewed together, formed a cohesive composition and concept. In most cases this came to be, though in at least two cases, the “cohesive” part of that equation doesn’t quite hold together.
Kate Emlen’s is in the former category. She takes one image of trees and breaks it down into constituent parts, almost as if she painted one large work and cut it up into 12 individual miniature works. Hung in a tight grid, we see the whole picture. The bottom three oil-on-linen works form the ground of the scene, with the sea visible through the bases of tree trunks. As we move up three more rows of three paintings each, we find ourselves in the treetops, with only sky visible behind. Each of the dozen paintings is beautiful in its own right, yet together they mirror the mind’s process of assembling a scene by observing its component elements. Oddly, though there is no question about the overall unity of the installation, I think I prefer considering individual works since, taken singly, they are more interesting compositionally within their tightly cropped framing.
Rick Fox, on the other hand, creates cohesiveness through palette and painting style, yet each work in his grid is a different landscape rendered in an array of deeply saturated jewel tones. Some feature rolling hills and farmland, some have rural structures in them while others do not, two include bodies of water (a river and a lake). I find this more rewarding visually than the jigsaw puzzle-style dissection of a single image. It feels like each little work is a discovery on its own, especially because all 12 are lushly painted in a gestural, expressionistic way that conveys a sense of a lot being packed into each 12-by-9-inch canvas. Single images build on each other to leave us with a powerful blast of color and mood.
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