In Dialogue is a conversation between seven Maine artists. The show arranges five individuals and one collaborative duo into pairs, exploring formal and conceptual overlaps in their varied works. Extended through October 1!

Matt Barter and Richard Keen channel lived experience and direct observation into bold interpretations of Maine’s working waterfront. From a young age, Barter worked on various commercial fishing boats, lobstering, and mussel harvesting. His sophisticated, rough-cut assemblage sculptures incorporate symbols of those industries–bait gloves, buoys, lobster traps, and the like– and pay tribute to the individuals who work within them. Keen, an abstractionist, has spent the last 20 years setting and tending boat moorings in Casco Bay. His paintings manipulate color, line, and geometry to translate objects he encounters in his work–rudders, keels, hulls–and the landscapes they intersect.

Grace Hager and Dean McCrillis toe the line between magic and mundane in vividly colored representations of encounters with the natural world. Hager’s ceramic works locate nature as a realm of possibility and transformative experience. Her use of oscillating color combined with landscape subjects positions magic within the observable, giving form to feelings of awe. Born and raised in western Maine, McCrillis pulls inspiration from the intensity of the state’s dense wilderness. His paintings reinterpret the tradition of sporting art, sourcing imagery from direct observation, memory, vintage family photos, and sporting ephemera. Skillfully rendered in wild palettes, his constructed scenes project an air of mystery and hover just beyond reality.

cee and she (a collaboration between Ashley O’Brion and Christina Wnek) and Lilian Day Thorpe present introspective works that combine texture, light, and a quiet sense of adventure. After building successful careers in other creative fields, O’Brion and Wnek launched cee and she to explore a shared resonance through ceramics. Born out of a joy of connection, their sculptural vessels bare each artist’s hand through highly textured glazes and organic forms. Conversely, Thorpe’s painterly photomontages are inspired by her proclivity for quietness and solitude. Shooting primarily on film, she manipulates and digitally collages her own photographs to create textural scenes that suggest fictional landscapes.