Plenty of art exhibits worth the ferry ride across Midcoast Maine | Column
One of my favorite summer pleasures is island hopping off midcoast Maine. Every August, I visit friends on Vinalhaven and North Haven, home to galleries — New Era on the former, Hopkins Wharf, the IceHouse on the latter — that hold interesting shows we look at today. To get there, of course, we embark on ferries from Rockland, so I am also including two small exhibitions at Caldbeck Gallery worth seeing, though, of course, there are multiple galleries and museums in Rockland worth visiting.
ROCKLAND
12 Elm St., “Kayla Mohammadi: Sun Pocket” and Jarid del Deo: Something Out There,” through Aug. 30, 207-594-5935, caldbeck.com
Kayla Mohammadi, “French Pot,” 2026, acrylic and oil on canvas. (Image courtesy of the artist and Caldbeck Gallery)
Mohammadi’s works take a range of approaches in this exhibition. They are all quite colorful, which is customary for this artist. But as her statement says, “I hope the viewer gets drawn to the work through color but then lingers to see what else is there.” In some, “what else is there” is a more easily answered question than in others. “French Pot,” for example, is a fairly straightforward still life of the title vessel, which is filled with flora. However, the more we look at it, the more it reveals. First, it seems to exist within an oval world of its own, almost like an embryo within the placental lining that separates it from blossoms that randomly float around it and enigmatic patterns — rectangles of chevrons, polka dots and stripes — that hover above it. So, we question what we are looking at or through, feeling it as something simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.
Kayla Mohammadi, “Repetition and Space,” 2024-26, oil on canvas. (Image courtesy of the artist and Caldbeck Gallery)
Others such as “Repetition and Space” are more conceptual, deliberately distorting our perceptual senses by showing a single still life of flowers in a vase through a grid which, within each tile, looks at the flora from a different angle. We travel from foreground to background and back again as our eyes move across and up and down the canvas. I find this complex multidimensionality the most interesting. But they are all to some degree explorations of abstraction through color and pattern.
The obvious starting point for del Deo’s work is landscape. But as his statement reads, “I am more comfortable exchanging what I consider visual accuracy for something that Is more spiritually expressive.” As the title suggests, there is something “out there” in these environments that is harder to pinpoint. We can intuit in what we initially understand as quotidian scenes—trees, clearings in the woods, meadows — something harder to accurately articulate, something that feels supernatural.
Jarid del Deo, “Radiant Intervals,” 2026, oil on panel. (Photo by And Again Docu, courtesy of the artist and Caldbeck Gallery)
The showstopper here — and it’s quite a magnificent one — is “Radiant Intervals.” In the foreground at the bottom half of the painting, we see a lush seaside landscape of trees, grasses and rock forms painted in bright unrealistic colors not unlike those found in fellow Maine artist Tessa Greene O’Brien’s landscapes. The sea beyond this promontory is a mottled red, and, on the horizon, is what appears to be a sunrise or moonrise, the heavenly body’s light effects on the water spreading out toward the vertical edges of the canvas.
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However, we might notice the incongruity of the sun or moon itself, which is black, and question how it can be emitting enough light to create these effects. Furthermore, the reflections themselves become an amorphous presence that dominates the canvas. It might resemble amoeba or an angel. It is illogical, enigmatic and lives in a mysterious alternate reality from the rest of the work.
Jarid del Deo, “Something Out There,” 2026, oil on panel. (Photo by And Again Docu, courtesy of the artist and Caldbeck Gallery)
In “Pink Mountain,” a rectangular opening in the clouds looks odd and pregnant with imminence. What do these parting clouds portend? The arrival of an alien spaceship? God? The Horsemen of the Apocalypse? We can’t know, and that ambiguity can feel a little unsettling in the midst of the scene’s natural beauty. At other times, del Deo can paint like Marsden Hartley (the show’s title painting, with its oddly shaped clouds and black sun or moon casting a long black streak across the water). Other times, as in “The Air Around Tom Paine’s,” he can resemble Lois Dodd but with an edge (the break in the icy surface of the pond suggesting a portal into another universe).
These are strange and wonderful paintings, well worth viewing before boarding the ferry.
VINALHAVEN
New Era
60 Main St., “Kenneth Banks & William Trevaskis,” through Aug. 31, 207-863-9351, neweragallery.com
The current show at New Era is a grab bag of artists and genres. There are magnificent large drawings by Alison Hildreth, carved ceramic tiles of schools of fish by Janet Gohres and gallery director Elaine Crossman’s own evocative landscapes. But the current “show within a show” belongs to two photographers working with exposed film. Some time ago, California photographer Kenneth Banks purchased a cache of Fuji film that he discovered already had images recorded on it. He decided to roll the film back and shoot over the existing images without knowing what the original ones were. Then he developed the film.
Kenneth Banks and William Trevaskis, “Crossing 1.” (Image courtesy of New Era Gallery)
The results intrigued him, so he bought more exposed film to co-create, with photographer friend William Trevaskis (Fox Islands, Maine), image overlays that can be by turns lyrical, odd, mysterious and funny. Banks would shoot a roll, wind it back and send it to Trevaskis, not informing him of what he had shot. Trevaskis would shoot his own imagery over it and then they would be developed.
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Michael Seif, “Gown,” photo encaustic. (Image courtesy of New Era Gallery)
This random process produces equally random results. The best of them create interesting juxtapositions that spark our imagination to create intriguing scenarios for each. “Crossing 1,” for instance, blends an image of a man in a rowboat over a shot of white industrial buildings, as though the latter have been completely submerged in water.
“Mystery Woman” comes from the original Fuji film series. Banks’s image of closed double doors is superimposed over a shot of an unknown woman who seems to be kicking back with laughter, tempting us to interpret it as something risqué or privately mischievous happening behind closed doors.
I want also to call out two other photographers showing at New Era currently: Ron Rosenstock, whose black-and-white photos of “Mouse Island from the Basin” and “Rocklines, Lane’s Island” feel almost like Luminist paintings with their breathtaking skies and expanses of water and islands; and Michael Self, whose swimming nudes viewed under a layer of encaustic feel at once contemporary, antique (recalling turn-of-the-century sepia images) and lyrical.
NORTH HAVEN
Hopkins Wharf Gallery and Ice House
7 Hopkins Wharf, various weekly exhibitions through summer; Ice House, behind Hopkins Wharf, also weekly exhibitions, 207-867-4444, hopkinswharfgallery.com
The model of both these galleries basically follows the idea of weekly popups. Owned by David Hopkins and artist David Wilson, the former gallery hosts exhibitions they curate, while the latter is given over to guest curators.
David Wilson, “Winged,” acrylic on burlap. (Image courtesy of the artist)
The shows I saw there on Aug. 10 are by now down, but to give you a sense of things, at Hopkins Wharf there was a group show that included various Maine scenes by Colin Page, who we can always count on to deliver sun-drenched scenes where the light is the thing. Page has a tremendous facility with this natural phenomenon, whether it manifests on the hulls of boats in the harbor or in views of a field. In the upstairs gallery were the lovely botanical gouaches of Lynn Krauss.
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David Wilson, “Far Cove, left, and “At 5am.” (Image courtesy of the artist)
Always in the mix at Hopkins Wharf are Wilson’s own paintings, woodland scenes that seem consistently enchanted by forest fairies and the demi-deities of various myths derived from classical antiquity and Northern European cultures. They recall the spiritually infused works of William Blake and Caspar David Friederich, Scottish fairy tales, the surrealism of Max Ernst and much other source material. They are abuzz with insects, birds, snakes, teardrops containing mini-universes, butterflies, winged sprites, and trees that look like hands with eyes peering out from their palms.
During my visit, the IceHouse was hung with an exhibition of four artists, “Tidal,” all of whom have spent long hours on, by or under the Maine waters. Richard Keen was showing his paintings of rockweed, which displayed a welcome break from his usual hard angles and sharp shapes. Their loose tangles of this ubiquitous sea flora feel fluid and almost abstract, and he depicts them with his usual bright color palette which, because of this freer, less pictorially graphic style, feels softer and more approachable.
Also interesting here was Siem Van Der Ven, who collects detritus and uses it to either press forms into paintings, or to create prints on which he then adds additional marks and washes. There were the “dark water” ceramics of Ben Potter and JT Gibson’s cast and/or fabricated bronze and aluminum wall reliefs.
Fox Island Gallery
7 Iron Point Road, 207-518-8423, foxislandgallery.com
This gallery was closed the day I was on the island. It presents more familiar Maine fare — paintings of the surrounding islands, landscapes, harbor scenes and so on — which always have a ready audience, particularly in the summer. Though depicting the same subject matter, one of the gallery’s stable of artists, Susan A. Cooney, does so with graphite, producing marvelous grayscale effects that stand out for their skill and precision.
Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland and can be reached at [email protected]. This column is free to access through support by The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.
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Tagged: art exhibit, art gallery, Midcoast Go
