A Particular Kind of Heaven: Karma, Thomaston, ME
Past exhibition
Overview
It isn’t easy to believe
the sky comes down to the ground
here, not just in the distance
behind the corner store where darkness
bleeds at the edges, but here, to say—
it is sky I’m breathing, as if that
implied heaven as well and perhaps
required something of us, like the effort
my daughter makes with her blue crayon
filling in between flowers, fence posts,
the branches of trees.—Betsy Sholl, “Learning to Love the Sky” (1986)
Maine Poet Laureate
A Particular Kind of Heaven presents a wide array of empyrean imagery by a multigenerational group of artists. Sited in a deconsecrated Catholic church, the exhibition probes connections between the spiritual and the natural, the everyday and the sublime. While the near-universal motif of the sky unites the expansive contributions on view, the representation of this subject morphs and multiplies to span pictorial fealty, surrealist interpretation, lyrical rumination, narrative landscapes, geometric and gestural abstractions, three-dimensional works made of sweetgrass and post-consumer paper, and more. A Particular Kind of Heaven is titled after a 1983 Ed Ruscha text painting that calls attention to the idiosyncratic nature of our visions of the sublime and our projections about and on to the American landscape. The exhibition proceeds from dawn to dusk, following the transformation of the sky over the course of a day.
Works
Gertrude Abercrombie, Landscape with Church, 1939
Installation Views
