Claire Seidl and
Rose Marasco

On View

August 26 – October 8, 2022

Opening Reception

August 26, 5–8pm

Music provided by Van Voorst Quartet

Artist Talk

September 8, 5–8pm

Claire Seidl and Rose Marasco at the opening.

This elegant exhibit showcases the work of two dynamic and accomplished women who have been making and exhibiting art in Maine for decades.  Their process, level of craftsmanship, and artistic intent compliment each other beautifully.  MMPA is very proud to bring to the public such accomplished artists and bodies of work.

—Denise Froehlich, Director MMPA

Claire Seidl

In 2018 I had an opportunity to meet with Claire Seidl, an artist I admire, to look at photographs.  Her images move toward abstraction and routinely incorporate movement with the same cast of characters and place. They feel like film sets and only vaguely hint at a narrative. They’re mysterious, captivating, and memorable. The more I looked at, and spent time with her images, the more the interplay of lines, shapes, light, and mark making relationships shifted symbiotically between mediums.  A shaft of light, motion, or blur in photograph might be repeated in her abstract paintings and works on paper.  After choosing some images together and talking about her career, we decided that we should do a retrospective exhibition, and publish a monograph to accompany the work.  On our side, MMPA was thrilled about the opportunity to showcase such a renown artist and shed light on her process.  Until delving into this project, I’ve only known Claire as a photographer who makes gelatin silver prints, and was delighted to find she had an entire oeuvre of paintings and works on paper. They are really what she’s known for.  Then Covid hit… The project was put on hold, exhibited elsewhere and many new exciting works were made between 2020 and 2022.  Four years later, I’m delighted to revisit this project and offer the viewer a chance to see the comparisons and interrelationships that excited me in the first place. —DF

I am an abstract painter and a photographer. My painter’s eye directs me in shooting, developing, and printing the photographs. Elements intrinsic to painting, like gestural line, multiple layered space, and ambiguous form and content, are all present. Some people see my photographs as abstractions, but they are deeply rooted in the real world; they are filled with specifics of place and people and natural phenomena —and their ephemeral nature. My approach to realism is subsumed by the camera itself, which reveals what we can’t see - in the dark, for example—or what is lost when we shift our gaze.  Many of my photographs are taken at night when our ability to see clearly is limited but the open gaze of the camera dispassionately records everything. All of my photographs suggest a human presence, with or without figures in them. At times, the images feel like a flash of memory, a moment held. I am very interested in how we see (or don’t see) what is right in front of us. The camera gathers more visual information, especially over time or in the dark, than our eyes can. It can hold multiple layers of space and reflections in focus while we can only perceive one at a time. My photographs show more than the unassisted eye can see. They are not manipulated in the darkroom. —CS

Photographs

Seidl’s unequivocally abstract, deliberately uningratiating paintings manage to suggest the instability of the natural world. Seidl’s photographs, whether of the outdoors or of interiors, seem to question the nature of seeing. She records (with low light and long exposures) unremarkable things that we might otherwise ignore: corners of rooms, recently vacated dining tables, ragged shrubbery, the edges of woods. Her images are so elusive that we question our perceptions, while we enjoy the subtle orchestration of tones and soft-edged shapes; the half-glimpsed, blurred figures and twining branches; the pale silhouettes; and the suggestions of things we can’t quite recognize, both man-made and natural. Something similar obtains in Seidl’s paintings despite their abstractness: a sense of immanence, of the ungraspable, presented in assured, declarative terms. It’s what keeps us looking.

—Karen Wilkin, Critic and Curator

Paintings

Photographs, paintings and monoprints are available for sale at the MMPA Store.

Mono Prints

Learn more about Claire Seidl’s process in an interview with Jan Pieter van Voorst van Beest:

Rose Marasco

Rose Marasco shares with us photographs from a portfolio entitled Parallax. This is the work that Marasco made, and continues to make, during the last two years of lock down and 3 years of Covid.  She is looking at the graphic elements that existed in domestic architecture and gardens in the Victorian period. Marasco herself lives in a Greek revival on the Historical registry built 1837 and named after it’s first owner, Abel Grover. This home is also the impetus for her next book, At Home, with a foreword by Lucy R. Lippard. The shadow play and construction techniques are the most interesting part of her work.  The way she edits and combines images to create modernist compositions sheds light on her thought process, and the kind of work she appreciates most in photography. She pays homage to the photographers who came before her: Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Vivian Maier and Lee Friedlander.  I imagine her walking the west end of historic Portland looking for how the light hits certain buildings at noon when the shadows are contrasty and the forms are flattened out. This current body of work, Parallax, also references earlier photographs she made 30 years ago.  It means, the effect whereby the position or direction of an object appears to differ when viewed from different positions, e.g. through the viewfinder and the lens of a camera. This approach has been done before by Marasco in her Domestic Objects series and The Maine Grange series.  She is quoting herself and examining architecture like she did with domesticity, ritual, identity, and community before. Many of the new images include her own shadow, her figure or evidence that she’s there making the photograph.  It reminds us of historic paintings where the portrait includes a palette, a brush, and an artist’s likeness—ownership.  A poignant and inescapable self portrait in the end.  —DF

Parallax Series

Often in the Spring (before the leaves appear) as I walk around my neighborhood in Portland, Maine, I am intrigued by the powerful tree shadow/shapes. A few years back, I shot one or two rolls of medium format color negative film but was not satisfied with the results. The prints stubbornly read as: a section of a house with a tree shadow in it. Which of course it is. But it wasn’t only the subject matter that intrigued me. I was after a more complex visual feeling that I was having when looking at the scene. In late February 2020 I decide to try photographing my shadow shapes again. I think maybe I’m looking up too much; and maybe the perspective is throwing it off. Therefore, I put a ladder in my car and go around the block. I shoot medium format color negative again. But this time I decide to shoot square, intuitively thinking this may read as more abstract. I drop off my roll at the camera store and have the 12 images printed 4x4 inches with a white border. When I pick the film up, I get to my car and immediately look at my prints. I like many! Later at home I lay out a sequence of nine that look well together. The photographs are still the same subject matter but, they read much more as a metaphor this time, especially in a sequence. I load another roll of film and continue my neighborhood photographing. It’s now early March– yes, just before COVID-19. I’m scheduled to go to The Tyrone Guthrie Center, an artist residency in Ireland, on March 26th. I have been looking forward to this very much. I have my tickets and all is in order. Until it isn’t. And then, there’s no way I’m getting on an airplane. Needless to say, everything is cancelled. In late February,2020 I decide to try photographing my shadow shapes again. I think maybe I’m looking up too much; and maybe the perspective is throwing it off. Therefore, I put a ladder in my car and go around the block. I shoot medium format color negative again. But this time I decide to shoot square, intuitively thinking this may read as more abstract. I drop off my roll at the camera store and have the 12 images printed 4x4 inches with a white border. When I pick the film up, I get to my car and immediately look at my prints. I like many! Later at home I lay out a sequence of nine that look well together. The photographs are still the same subject matter but, they read much more as a metaphor this time, especially in a sequence. I load another roll of film, and continue my neighborhood photographing. It’s now early March– yes, just before COVID-19. I’m scheduled to go to The Tyronie Guthrie Center, an artist residency in Ireland, on March 26th. I have been looking forward to this very much. I have my tickets and all is in order. Until it isn’t. And then, there’s no way I’m getting on an airplane. Needless to say, everything is cancelled. —RM

Learn more about Rose Marasco’s process in an interview with Jan Pieter van Voorst van Beest on the Featured Artist page.

Windows and Walks Series

Reflections of moments found while walking through familiar neighborhoods of Portland, Maine. Made with an iPhone, they verge on the subconscious observation of the world as one passes through with a keen eye towards the intersection of light and dimension. Find the complete series on Rose’ Instagram page:

Collect and make your own juxtapositions of these individual 5 x 5 inch prints available for sale in the MMPA Store.