Contemporary Arts

2007 Individual Artist Fellowship Awardees in the Contemporary Arts:Christine Renee Parrish, John Knight & Peter Dembski


	Christine Renee Parrish

Three panels of extraordinary accomplished professionals assembled in August to select the 2007 fellowships in the contemporary arts. Panelists, as usual, were all from out of state to insure an unbiased review. Most of them served through the generosity of other institutions in Maine who had invited them here for participation in their programming and for that the Maine Arts Commission is extremely grateful.

The literary arts panel was drawn primarily from the lecturers and resident faculty at Stonecoast Writers' Conference, a low residency summer program run by the University of Southern Maine. Meena Alexander and Ray Gonzales, who both write in a variety of genres, were brought to Maine by Stonecoast. Charles Coe, a poet from Massachusetts, drove up to Maine in the pouring rain to serve as the third panelist. Each panelist had received a daunting package on their doorstep — more than 1,000 pages of submissions — and dutifully read through their lead juror assignments arriving to the panel discussion with their top selections. After reading through all of the finalists and engaging in some interesting debate over the difference in genres and support for poetry versus playwriting for example, they came to agreement. Parrish was chosen for her very humorous and finely crafted piece, Chasing Chairman Mao: Across China Barefoot.

Christine Renee Parrish
grew up on the coast of Maine reading Doris Lessing, Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. After graduating high school near the bottom of her class at the age of 16, she packed sardines at a Down East cannery, waitressed in Florida and was a deckhand on a sailboat before attending college in her mid-twenties.

A deep respect for nature and an adventurous curiosity led Parrish to a career as an itinerant field biologist after she graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Natural Resources. Her subsequent fieldwork included collecting fisheries data aboard a Japanese trawler in the Bering Sea, fighting wildfires in Wyoming and working with Peregrine falcons in the Green Mountains in Vermont. At the same time she began writing freelance articles for local newspapers and magazines.

Christine received a graduate degree in writing from Colorado State University before returning to Maine, where she continues to balance her interests in natural resource conservation and narrative journalism. She spent several months in China in 2003, hence “Across China Barefoot.”

Excerpt From: Chasing Chairman Mao: Across China Barefoot- By Christine Parrish
A stylishly dressed Chinese woman in her mid-twenties stepped out from the crowd.
“New teacher?” she asked in English.
She introduced herself as Helen, confidently took my bag and led me toward the doors of the terminal. She paused in the middle of the lobby to hand my bag to another woman with a broad, flat face. She looked less sophisticated than Helen did, and older.
“Are you from the school?” I asked them.
“Yes, of course,” Helen said, nodding her head in the direction of her companion. “And this is my sister, Janet.”
Janet shouldered my bag and they hurried out to the parking lot with me trailing along behind. Janet put my bag in the trunk of a small red car and Helen opened the door to the back seat for me.
“Please, get in.”
We zipped out of the airport and headed into the city, dodging cars, buses, and pedestrians. The sparkly glass of new high rise buildings flashed past in the pale morning sunshine. In contrast to the outer corner of Beijing that I had seen, it all looked so new; new sidewalks, new streets, new buildings, fashionable women walking in super pointy toed shoes so popular in Italy this season. So chic, all dressed in black. No baggy blue Mao suits and red badges here. Hardly any bicycles, either. Just well dressed people with black hair, walking. It could be any modern city anywhere in the world flashing past like a jerky video music clip. Except it was China. And all the people were Chinese.
“Have you been at the school very long?” I asked Helen just to have something to say.
She turned back to look at me.
“First time China?” she asked, smiling widely. “You like?”
I said I did what I had seen of it. Satisfied with my answer, she turned back to the front. Her sister seemed to speak no English at all. I tried again.
“Helen, how far to the school?”
This time, she shook her head and said something to her sister then turned to me.
“Address?”
“Address?” I echoed, and said the name of the school. She shook her head again.
“Address,” she said firmly. “In Chinese.”
“But I don’t have the address.”
“Need address,” she said. “You write.”
My jetlagged haze cleared abruptly. Something was clearly wrong.
“I don’t know the address. You’re supposed to know the address.”
“Need address,” she said, again.
I didn’t know who they thought I was and I certainly didn’t know who they were. Had they come to pick up a teacher for another school and had picked me up by mistake? I fumbled in my pockets and found the phone number for the school.
“Phone?” I asked Helen, putting my forefinger and thumb to my ear and mouth in the universal phone symbol. Helen shook her head.
“Mobile?” I said, not quite believing her. Didn’t every urban Chinese have a cell phone? All the ones in the airport seemed to.
“No phone. Address. Address. You write.”
Meanwhile, Janet kept driving as fast as she could away from the airport. I scrambled through my pockets for some scrap of information about the school and came across the free pen from the airlines, which might actually have come in handy except that I had no address for the school. Just the phone number Bruce had given me to call when I reached Beijing to let them know when I would arrive in Dalian so he could send someone to the airport to meet me. Someone, it turned out, who was not Helen.
“I don’t have the address.”
“Address,” said Helen, admonishing me.
“No address,” I countered.
I opened my Chinese phrase book and flipped around until I stumbled across the phrase “Are you the representative from...?” and pointed it out to Helen. She shrugged a little and laughed.
“Taxi?” I asked. Suddenly I knew what had happened. I had gotten in an unlicensed taxi: these two women weren’t from the school or from any other language institute. They weren’t even taxi drivers; there was no taxi meter in the car. They were two outlaw entrepreneurs with a compact car and twenty words of English between them. Helen had stepped in front of the taxi touts with confidence, that’s all. She had bluffed her way in.
“Taxi,” she agreed.
“No taxi,” I said, pointing at the word “school” in the phrasebook, but Helen shrugged again and her sister kept driving away from the airport. I managed to find the word “NO” in the phrasebook.
“Bu, bu, bu, bu, bu,” I said emphatically and motioned Janet to pull to the side of the road.
What Bruce forgot to mention when he told me I would be just fine without knowing how to speak Chinese—and I was just starting to find out-- was that probably 1.2 billion of the 1.25 billion Mainland Chinese couldn’t understand a word of English. That meant the burden of communication rested completely with me when I wasn’t in the classroom. Had I not been so tired and so hungry, I would have realized NO was probably one of the English words they did understand.

Georges Herms, resident faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and an icon of assemblage art, Beverly Semmes and Nicole Cheribini, both serving as resident faculty at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts (and distinguished artists in their own right) formed the trio of visual arts jurors. Together they viewed more than1,000 sides over and over again until they reached unanimous agreement on the selection of John Knight of Portland as the recipient of the visual arts fellowship. Everyone responded to John’s fresh investigation of the landscape and compositional acuity.


	John Knight

John Knight
lives and works in Portland, ME. He completed a painting MFA. in 1998 at American University and a painting BFA at Indiana University. He received additional training at Accademia Di Belle Arte, Perugia, Italy. In addition to John’s studio practice he is employed as instructor with the Maine College of Art and the University of Southern Maine for six and five years respectively. In 2002, he was an Artist in Residence at Acadia National Park. Knight’s recent solo exhibitions include a 2005 show at the Clown Gallery, Portland, ME, and in 2004 at the Ethan Cohen Fine Arts Center, New York City.

The jurors for the fellowship in the performing arts were: Robert Moses, in Maine from San Francisco to perform at the Bates Dance Festival with his group Robert Moses Kin, Simone Fontanelli, composer and conductor at the Mozarteum University, Salzburg, who makes his home in Gorgonzola, Italy and visits Maine as resident composer at the Bowdoin International Music Festival, and lastly, Larraine Brown, a Toronto playwright, best known in Maine for Belfast’s three-minute play festival. Together these three jurors selected the jazz compositions of Peter Dembski of Surry as worthy of the award. The jurors felt Peter’s work was mature, intellectually refined and skillfully honed.

An 18-year resident of Surry, ME, Peter Dembski has been playing piano since the age of three. Throughout his late teens and early twenties he studied and lived in Paris, Edinburg and Rome. He was educated at Yale University, Universita per Stranieri in Perugia, Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris and at Bennington College.


	Peter Dembski

After finishing his education, Peter moved to New York where he worked as a theater and dance composer, arranger and pianist. Additionally, he has played as a musician at The American Dance Institute, Harvard University and New York University and a sideman for various players in the jazz world. He has performed in clubs throughout the US and Europe.

His Pandea Group gigs regularly at 55 bar, one of the oldest jazz venues in Greenwich Village, NYC. A quartet/quintet he formed to perform his original work, the group consists of Peter on piano, bassist Ron McClure, Bob Devos on guitar and Grisha Alexiev on drums.

Peter Dembski teaches gifted high school music students through a partnership with the Hancock County Mentorship Program. He specializes in teaching musical improvisation to non-improvising classical musicians, a technique he first developed at the University of Maine and is working on a book, Playing with Music which demonstrates these unique techniques. He is a past recipient of the Maine Arts Commission’s Good Idea Grant and receives funding from the Mary Duke Biddle Semans Family.

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