Ayers Island art exhibits go beyond convention Installations explore human imagination

ORONO – It wasn’t your typical Maine arts festival. No craft displays. No framed landscape or wildlife paintings. In fact, nothing framed, nothing static.

Instead, those who attended the first Ayers Island Contemporary Arts Festival on Sunday were free to roam, observe and interact with just under two dozen multimedia exhibits housed in and around the former industrial mill on Ayers Island.

While the festival was blessed with sunshine all day, the eerie, post-industrial squalor of the building itself – vast empty rooms, drippy ceilings, peeling paint – perfectly complemented the art installations.

“People see the exhibits and say, ‘Wow, this is interesting!’ And that’s really what we’ve tried to do, to explore people’s imaginations, like a playground for adults,” George Markowsky, owner of the island and chairman of the University of Maine’s computer science department, explained.

Markowsky estimated that over the course of the afternoon between 200 and 300 people had passed through the site.

A slow stroll through the main building took observers through a labyrinth of cool, dank rooms and past series of deceptively simple-looking exhibits created by young, forward-thinking artists from Maine, France, Canada and the United Kingdom.

In one room, a core sample of peat moss was growing out of a clear, plastic tube while a series of hidden speakers around it blurted out buzzing construction noise.

In the next installation, blue light was projected across a large puddle, creating a simple, mesmerizing reflection of the water’s surface dancing against the concrete wall.

A peek down a long, empty corridor revealed a room where a lone, fully lighted Christmas reindeer stood slowly nodding its head in the darkness.

Meanwhile, outside, a diverse crowd of artists, observers and educators milled about and conversed.

The sizable number of French-speaking participants highlighted the festival’s aim at pushing multiple boundaries.

“The theme ‘Without Borders’ is the idea of thinking globally. To think outside the borders of our state and outside the borders of art,” Owen Smith, the festival’s curator and director of UMaine’s new media department, said.

Smith said some of the installations will remain on view through Sept. 15 during the Ayers Island building’s business hours.

“Having all the French people was just fantastic,” said Paul Bosse, a twentysomething musician who grew up in the Orono area but now lives in Portland. Bosse participated Sunday with a percussion performance played entirely on discarded fire extinguishers.

“And I’m very thankful to have the space to work,” he said. “You can’t do this in a traditional venue, like a bar or a coffeehouse. I hope they continue with this, keep building on it.”

For more information, log onto www.withoutborders.ayersisland.com. George Bragdon can be reached at gbragdon@bangordailynews.net.