Gathering; Moon Worship

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 incorporporated 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 project 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).

Join us in celebrating the opening of the exhibition on May 6th from 5-7pm, with a First Friday performance activation by artist and basketmaker Max Romero (Mi’kmaq & Laguna/Taos Pueblo) at 5:30pm.

Shane Charles (b. 1983, Maine) lives and works in Portland, ME. He has held significant solo and group shows at many museums and art foundations including: NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY (solo, 2022); the Center for Maine Contemporary Art (2020); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2019), Wassaic Project, NY (2019), I-Park Foundation, CT (2019); Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland (solo, 2015); and the Ackland Art Museum, NC (2015). His performance installations have been supported by many prestigious institutions including Goethe-Institut Boston (2021), a site-specific commission for Re-site, by Space Gallery, Portland, ME (2020), and the School of Visual Arts, NYC (2018). His work is in the public collections of the Goethe-Institut Boston, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, ME, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He holds a BA in Fine Art from the University of Maine through the Indigenous Wabanaki program, and a Master of Fine Arts from UNC at Chapel Hill, where he worked with artists elin o’Hara slavick and Jeff Whetstone. 

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. www.shanecsmith.com

Image credit: Detail of Shane Charles, Blue Hunter’s Moon 2020 I, 2020. Cibachrome print in White Pine frame, 34.5 inches x 25 inches