Abstract Photography

UMVA Gallery @ Portland Media Center

516 Congress Street

Portland, Maine

Online Exhibition: visit www.theumva.org 

The Union of Maine Visual Artists presents its February 2021 exhibition Abstract Photography online at https://umvaportlandgallery.blogspot.com/2021/01/abstract-photography.html. Curator and artist Greg Mason Burns of Brunswick, Maine invited eight Maine photographers to participate in the show. Burns invited each of the eight other photographers to present four images to interpret life, their feelings and their observations in abstract form.

 Falmouth photographer Lesley MacVane exhibits four provocative and deeply moving images she calls “My Isolation Has Wrapped My Home In A Cloud Of Memories.” Her photographs are dreamscapes of collaged images skillfully layered and ghosted. MacVane briefly explains in her artist statement that “[e]ach piece of furniture, picture, book, knickknack, has a connection to a memory. The whole has become a collage to my personal history. It has become my womb during this time of isolation.”

 Jan Pieter van Voorst van Beest of Pownal, Maine, whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, contributed work that, as he explains, “reduces realistic compositions into basic essentials of line, form and color, sometimes supplementing and overlaying them with random line and shapes.” In “Abstract 2” the photographer draws a suggestive calligraphy of white lines across a background of flat jagged tides of grey and black. The lines suggest an encrypted message being sent but yet to be understood.

 Greg Burns presents these 36 images created by nine Maine photographers with accompanying statements from the artists as an exploration of what abstract photography conveys about our lives, from its elemental architectural lines and forms to its multi-layered expressive nature. It is an online exhibition that is perfect for those who wish to explore the meaning and possibilities of abstract photography in quiet moments before their computer screen.

 Exhibited photographers: Lesley MacVane (Falmouth) , Jan Pieter van Voorst van Beest (Pownal), Dave Wade (Portland), Jim Kelly (Kennebunk), Ann Tracy (Portland), Mark Barnette (Portland), CE Morse of (Cumberland Center), John Ripton (Kennebunkport) and Greg Mason Burns (Brunswick).