OPENING RECEPTION
Thursday, October 22nd, from 4 - 7 pm, in the Fort Hall Gallery.
Directions to the Fort Hall Gallery can be found here.
Descend into Cavity: a conversation between two artists and builders. Transcending the utilitarian nature of their trades, these works evoke the animacy of structure and space by paying homage to the unseen artistry of laborers.
Stone-worker Jim Larson’s colossal forms cast shadows through the vast post-industrial mill exhibition hall. Henry Austin’s embodied expressions of the subconscious stretch the edges of a carpenter's frame. Hard earth formed through force, and paint carried through air: opposing elements that both reflect the relationship between presence and absence.
“Black and white both contain all colors. Split white open with a prism and behold our visible spectrum of color before it coagulates into an inky black. Immortal opposites bearing more in common than not. Cavity makes something out of nothing. Boring holes through hallowed earth, we search for absent spaces ready to receive us. A stone rolls over, and we are trapped. It’s frightening to think how much a stick-frame house resembles a cage. Perhaps we feel safe at home because it is like a cage. The sun casts zebra print shadows dictating the passage of our lives. We better look for a door and hope it’s unlocked.”
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Henry Austin (b. 1993) is a visual artist living and working in Portland, ME. Born and raised in Lander, Wyoming, he forever fell in love with the red dirt and juniper trees behind his home.
Austin makes artwork as a form of worship to the most impactful moments and places of his life. Crouching or kneeling before the canvas, he embraces the intuitive actions of his body and the physicality of the work. Making artwork is a process of grieving where grief passes through his body, out of his mind, and into the work.
In the spring of 2018, Austin co-founded New System Exhibitions-- an alternative project space and exhibition venue for emerging, local, and regional artists in Portland, ME.
He feels that owning a horse has nothing to do with being a cowboy.
View Henry’s work here.
Jim Larson (b. 1994) is an artist and a builder. He grew up in the Granite State playing in old quarries and working with traditional craftspeople. He approaches space as something we do not passively occupy, but actively produce.
As an artist, he works with an understanding that our community (and its architecture) should be continuously edited, maintained, and rebuilt by those who work within it. Structures (and the traditions surrounding them) are not fixed; they are adaptive and shaped over time through use and through necessity. Larson’s work interrogates the stratification of design and labor, and alternatively it insists on a direct connection between the imagined and the built, the hand and its products.
Specifically, Larson engages stone as a volumetric and variable material: a humble piece of the ground, carrying mass and irregularity, capable of both occupying and defining space. Through its variability, stone demands conversational making and carving; it resists standardization and instead foregrounds the human decisions required in its use.
View Jim’s work here.