Gathering; Moon Worship Opening Reception & Performance with Small Pieces of A Greater Whole Opening

Join SPACE during this First Friday Art Walk in celebrating the opening of Gathering: Moon Worship, an exhibit from Portland artist Shane Charles, and Small Pieces of A Greater Whole by Portland artist Ashley Page, on May 6th from 5-7pm. Start your weekend off with a brilliant performance activation by artist and basketmaker Max Romero (Mi’kmaq & Laguna/Taos Pueblo) at 5:30pm

Shane Charles is an artist whose large-scale performance and sculpture installations deal with themes of memory and storytelling in psychogeography. Charles’ grandfather made maps and his father was a Penobscot tribal member and land surveyor. Charles’ works ritualize the relationship between body and land, and make the act of cartography something active and lived.

Gathering: Moon Worship is the latest exhibition by Shane Charles, dealing with relationship and connection of the moon to making and memory. It is the second of his three part Gathering series of sculpture and performance installations that explore the shift between appearance and disappearance, and the divide of generational loss.

His series Native Soil (2015-2020) commemorated his father’s work as the Penobscot surveyor after the 1980 Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act. Hand-stitched hemp with soil from these lands, mixed with ash and paint, take the form of mapped terrain. For Gathering: Moon Worship, Charles has reimagined a work from this series in memoriam to his father, who passed on Memorial Day, 2020. He has also incorporated pieces commissioned from Maine-based craftsmen to create new work for this exhibition, which features movement-based artists in homage to Yves Klien’s body-print based works. These works in their entirety are a meditation on the “body and the moon.” Supported by SPACE, this exhibition marks a continuation for Charles’ installation series Gathering, which started at the Back Bay of Boston’s Goethe Institut (2021) and will continue on to the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, NY (2022).

“My practice is a vessel used to present representation and visibility to the Black American mind, body and spirit. Steeped in personal nuance, my work serves as a testament to the beauty, grace, and complexities of the Black American experience. Stitching together paper, fiber, steel, collected ephemera, and collaborative social projects, I explore the possibilities of expression and liberation. My objects are a hybridization of traditional fiber techniques (basketry, weaving, coiling, etc) and spatial practice to reimagine the human body and explore different modes of portraiture.”

Ashley Page is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Portland, ME. She presently holds a BFA in Sculpture and a Minor in Public Engagement from Maine College of Art & Design (MECA&D). As a maker, a curator, a woman of color, a community member, a little sister, and a daughter, she creates space for dialogue, representation, intergenerational exchange, and creative expression. She is currently the Studio and Programs Coordinator at Indigo Arts Alliance, where she works within the intersection of art and activism. In the spring 2020, she was awarded the Heart and Soul Student Award by Maine Campus Compact for her D.E.I work as a student while at MECA&D. More recently, she was a 2021 Maine Craft Association Apprenticeship recipient with Lissa Hunter who served as her Mentor in sculptural basketry. Her curatorial and studio practice has been seen in the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, The Abyssinian Meeting House, The Portland Museum of Art, Congress Square Park, Able Baker Contemporary, New Systems Exhibitions, and more.

Header image by Carolyn Wachniki