July 28 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Please join us for the inaugural open studios of the alumni residency at MECA's Porteous Building, 522 Congress Street in Portland, Maine.

This year’s selected participants are Sage Lewis ’04, Eric Nichols MFA ’13, Ray Ewing ’12 and Dylan Hausthor ’15.

The alumni residency at MECA is designed to bring a small group of alumni back to campus each summer for five weeks of studio time while renewing their ties to the College. Originally conceived as an MFA only residency, it has since expanded to include BFA alums.

Header: Sage Lewis in her studio space

https://www.meca.edu/event/meca-alumni-residency-open-studios/

Looking ahead to summer residencies!

In late June I'll be doing a residency at the Stephen Pace House in Stonington, Maine.

My time at the Pace House Residency will be spent working on a body of collage-based works on paper informed by my research on geology and planetary sciences. I use a process of cutting and refitting as well as cutting and mending to produce compositions that confuse spatial relationships among layers of printed materials. I'll also be using my camera and hand-held scanner to explore the geology of the Maine coast, including bedrock fractures, metamorphic folding, and glacial erratics.

I will have 2 Open Studios while I'm at the house: Wednesday, June 28th from 5:00-7:00pm and Saturday, July 1st from 10:00am-2:00pm. Come visit!

For the month of July I'll be participating in an Alumni Residency at Maine College of Art. This will be an opportunity for me to use facilities at MECA to create a body of new work and to process material that I generate during my time at the Pace House. If you are passing through Portland during the month of July, I invite you to get in touch and come visit my studio at MECA.

Last June I participated in the Halide Project's first exhibition called Living Image and this March I'm excited to be showing with them once again at Gravy Studio & Gallery in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia. The Halide Project is a non-profit org that promotes the continued practice and appreciation of traditional and alternative photographic processes. My contribution to this exhibition includes 10 pieces that utilize silver gelatin darkroom processes including paper negatives, photograms, and contact prints.

I'll be giving an artist talk about my work during the opening which runs from 6-9pm on Friday, March 3rd. The artist talk portion of the event will begin around 7:30. Hope to see you there!

Check out the exhibition preview in The Spirit News.

Metal on DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia art blog.

Sarah and Sean looking at melting ice.

This week I had the pleasure of being a visiting artist at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. I was invited by Professor of Painting & Drawing, Sean Foley, who is a former professor of mine and an amazing painter whom I admire greatly. Sean and I had a fascinating time looking at ice and snow melting under a petrographic microscope, alongside fellow COA faculty geologist, Sarah Hall. As a geomorphologist, Sarah's research focuses on the processes that shape the surface of the earth, which of course made me swoon.

Sean and I were like little kids watching cartoons, utterly transfixed!

We took screenshots from the microscope's camera.

During my artist talk I showed images from Qatar that have influenced my current work looking at the surface of the earth, the moon, and Mars. I showed some examples of how those images come to be assembled and how we can derive strategies for abstraction from these methods (scale shifts, perspective, use of mediating devices, and compressions of time). I've been thinking a lot about Mars analogues, places on earth that have features or conditions that mimic Mars itself, and it turns out that Sarah has done a lot of research in one of the most important Mars analogues - the Atacama Desert in Chile and Peru. In talking with Sarah I learned that her research on the Atacama also involves techniques used by planetary geologists to study Mars. I was delighted.

At the end of my visit, I was able to participate in a mini-critique during Sean's Abstraction class and got to hear from students about current projects relating to biomorphic and Suprematist/Futurist influences. Because of COA's interdisciplinary curricular structure, students bring a wide range of expertise to the discussion referencing topics from statistics, philosophy, and literature. Even though we were running out of time at the end of our day, it was great to hear, if briefly, so many areas of knowledge coming together. Hooray for abstraction!

Big thanks to Sean Foley and Sarah Hall for their generosity during my visit. COA is a remarkable place.

Thanks to Seven Days for giving an honorable mention to my Fixed/Fluxed exhibition on their list of Favorite Art Exhibitions of 2016!

photo by Sam Simon.

Mapping Extremes (project space) at Able Baker Contemporary, 29 Forest Avenue, Portland, Maine, 04101

OPENING RECEPTION FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14, 5:00-8:00

Visual information about remote areas of the world (arctic and desert; influenced by and inhabiting changing extremes of weather) tends to favor a numerical and pessimistic set of charts. Conversely, visual information about the local often reflects our immediate lived experience with the environment, in the form of pictorial landscape representations. In Mapping Extremes, these tendencies are altered; on one hand by taking language away from visual responses to extreme landscapes, and focusing on tightly-enclosed aspects of those environments (lumps of ice, bits of rock); and on the other hand reimagining visual data to facilitate a more flexible understanding of global climate trends and their relationship to local centers of climate-related information.

Magenta Desert by Sage Lewis (left) alongside Blackstone Glacier Ice #2, an ice photogram by Shoshannah White.

Artists Sage Lewis and Shoshannah White work with imagery from opposite ends of climatic extremes--Lewis's work stemming from images she gathered in the deserts of Qatar, White's from the rapidly-degenerating Arctic Circle, which she visited by boat with her camera. In both bodies of work, the surfaces of these landscapes--surfaces which voicelessly contain the secrets about the future of life on earth--form nearly non-objective compositions that turn the viewer away from a narrative reading and gesture toward the non-verbal experience of living in the environment, moment by moment.

Cartographer Christian MilNeil reverses this non-narrative optical approach with specifically designed visual information addressing global and local environmental issues. Through his detailed use of graphics and mapmaking, MilNeil turns the conversation about climate change from the broadly understood to the impact of immediate visual recognition. As a counterpoint to the work of Lewis and White, MilNeil reflects the lived experience of climate change back to everyday life.

Mapping Extremes runs October 14-November 26, 2016. Artists' reception is on Friday, October 14, 5:00-8:00...please join us

Read the exhibition review in the Portland Press Herald.

I am honored to have curated this year's faculty exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art. Bounty opens August 24th with an Opening Reception on September 2nd, 5-8pm. Ten artists are included in the show with media ranging from video, installation, and photography to ceramics, drawing, illustration, and of course, painting.

Thanks to Maine College of Art for putting together this profile on my practice: Artist, Curator, Material Explorer.

Read the Art Review of Bounty in the Portland Press Herald

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Fixed/Fluxed: Sage Lewis

July 1-October 1, 2016

Opening Reception July 1, 5-8pm

Meet the Artists Reception July 22, 5-8pm

Burlington City Arts

135 Church Street

Burlington, VT 05401

I'm thrilled to be participating in the Project Space residency at VSW this month. Between May 9th and June 3rd, I'm using the project space as a studio, print lab, and gallery space to test images and processes and produce new work related to my Temporary Surface series. 

First Friday Reception June 3rd, 6-9pm

31 Prince Street, Rochester, NY

The Halide Project presents Living Image on view June 3, 2016 - June 26, 2016

Located at Gravy Studio & Gallery, 910 North 2nd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123

Selected by Artforum Photo Editor Chandra Glick from an international call for entry, the works on view in Living Image speak to the craftsmanship of the techniques used to create them. From historic processes to photograms to sculptural pieces, the work serves to reconnect viewers with the handmade aspects of photography that have largely been disassociated from the medium in the digital age.

The exhibition features work by 18 artists working with traditional and alternative process photography from Philadelphia, the U.S., and beyond: Matthew Ashby, Felix Bernier, Kate Copeland, Chadric Devin, Nicholas Fedak II, Martin Frank, Lisa Gidley, Matt Giel, Hans Gindlesberger, Rachel Guardiola, Mike Hoover, Lucang Huang, Sage Lewis, Serena Perrone, Pam Rouleau, Rebecca Silberman, John Steck Jr., Amanda Tinker.

Living Image is made possible through the generous support of the Penn Treaty Special Services District.

Come check out the show during our open gallery hours on Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 6pm, or by appointment, throughout the duration of the show. Or join us for a sneak preview on First Friday (June 3rd, 6-9pm) or during our Artists Reception on Sunday, June 5th from 2-5pm!

In conjunction with the exhibit, we will be hosting a variety of interactive events, including a lecture by Chandra Glick, cyanotype making in the park, a large format photography workshop, an informal group critique, and a trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s study room. We hope you’ll join us for one or more of these events!

Transitional Landscapes

May 6 - June 10, 2016

Thanks to Natasha Egan for the Juror's Honorable Mention for my work in the exhibition.

I'm spending this week at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson for Vermont Artist Week. Join us this Sunday for Open Studios!

Vermont Artists Week open studios
May 1st, 2016
2:00-4:00pm

All are welcome!

You’ll have the opportunity to explore the studio spaces of over 50 painters, sculptors, writers, and other Vermont-based fine artists. Visitors are also welcome to attend the artists’ reception for the group show Objects of Satisfaction (currently on view in VSC’s Gallery II exhibition space; light refreshments provided). 

This is a free, public event.

RSVP is encouraged but not required; to do so, respond on Facebook, call 802-635-2727 weekdays between 8:30am-5pm,  or email  info@vermontstudiocenter.org anytime.

Campus maps and a list of participating artists will be available in each studio building on the day of the event.  

Today I spent Worldwide Pinhole Day at the Vermont Center for Photography where we made pinhole cameras and developed prints in the darkroom. I'm planning to use my canister pinhole more over the next month working with black fabric as my subject matter. In today's pinhole print, the fabric is laid out on a concrete plinth with parking garage in the back.

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Space Jamz is now live! Check out my work in the digital exhibition Group Show #47 called Space Jamz over at the Humble Arts Foundation site. Browsing this show will give you some ideas on the range of beauty, humor, and obsession formed around this topic and the medium of photography. See if you can locate my piece which was made in Doha and is about the act of looking at and picturing the desert in an unfamiliar way.

Thanks to my host, the fabulous Melissa Vogley-Woods for capturing this intro to cyanotype workshop with her Denison printmaking students! My cyanotype globe made of kozo tissue has seen better days but it was fun to inflate it again and see what is possible when printing on such lightweight paper.

I'm thrilled to be headed to Ohio next week as a Visiting Artist at Denison University. I'm looking forward to conducting studio visits and giving an artist talk about my recent work at the Denison Museum, free and open to all!

My work is included in Issue 04 of Touch.My.Prints., an online publication aimed at the promotion of artists and ideas dealing with new media and photographic theory. Thanks to Aaron Brumbelow for putting this together.

Touch.My.Prints Issue 04 features projects of photographic still lifes. TMP is interested in the special way the photographic process can flatten space. In the process of a studio still life, the artist can have complete control over lighting, objects, composition, etc. This control allows for a constructed environment to showcase a wide range of concepts. ISSUE04 STI//_/IFES includes the work of Robert Ladislas Derr, Lisa Talbot, Anna Pinkas, Sage Lewis, Katherine Trimble, and Katrina Stamatopouls. Download a copy here.

Our residency time in this beautiful spot is nearing an end. Vermont friends, please come out to see what we've been working on.