BANGOR – The University of Maine Museum of Art will present two new exhibitions beginning July 17 – “Sam Cady: Reality and Reverie,” and “Jocelyn Lee: Youth.” The exhibits will run through Oct. 7.

Sam Cady’s large-scale, shaped canvas paintings blur the boundary between painted illusion and the three-dimensional world. Often it is not until viewers get close to the large, cut-out compositions that they can be sure that they are looking at a two-dimensional flat surface and not a three-dimensional sculpture, a painting with pieces of the real thing fastened to it or even the object itself.

This trompe l’oeil – or fool the eye effect – is key to Cady’s realism, although in his hands the technique serves as a playful means to an end rather than as a deliberate final product. In his shaped painting, “Ice Fishing Shanty, Moose Pond,” Cady has enhanced the effects of the trompe l’oeil painting by cutting it out in the shape of the fishing shack, thereby eliminating its context. Through careful jigsaw work, he fabricates the wooden framework of such a painting to mimic the outline of the object or scene. He frequently adopts this compositional device to depict such structures and landscapes as an aluminum utility shed, a pitched tent, a mobile home, a peapod dinghy, a tree or a rocky coastal island; or to crop excerpts of buildings, highway underpasses, bridges or a backyard woodpile.

Many of his paintings of familiar Maine subjects encourage us to imaginatively climb right in. “Snow Covered Dock,” for example, invites visual entry at the floor of the gallery and leads up the long walkway, blanketed by snow. This tall canvas seems to transcend the two-dimensional universe to deliver the viewer to another time and place. Viewers can imagine the freezing air entering noses and the anticipation of the unknown at the end of the dock.

In Sam Cady’s art it is the viewers who occupy the artist’s places and structures.

Sam Cady was born in Boothbay Harbor in 1943. He received a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1965 and a master’s degree in fine art from Indiana University in 1967. He is an instructor in the Master of Fine Arts Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

In Jocelyn Lee’s large, color photographs of young people, time has stopped in a manner that seems most apparent, the subjects locked forever in the transition to maturity. In one, a girl pauses at the edge of a diving board to look back suspiciously at the viewer. In another, two girls kneeling in a clearing appear to create an impromptu science experiment involving a dead beaver.

These are images that may inspire each of us to reflect upon our own youth. But while the captured moments may feel familiar, their essence is hard to describe. The viewer might be left wondering how a simple subject and process are capable of rendering objects that transcend a mere cataloging of person and place. The portraits conjure questions whose answers remain elusive. The figures never appear other-worldly. In fact, they give the impression of being rooted to their surroundings. Perhaps part of the mystery is the degree to which the figure and its context depend on each other. The photographs seem imbued with a meaning that we sense is significant, even though it’s troubling not to be able to define what it is about these children that holds the interest.

The fascination of these portraits also resides in the simple pleasures of the visual experience – the beauty of skin, of fabric, of differences, of uniqueness. Viewers have the luxury of gazing upon an occasion that is without self-consciousness among the three parties – the subject, the photographer and the viewer.

Jocelyn Lee was born in Naples, Italy. She received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and visual arts from Yale University and a master’s degree in fine art in photography from Hunter College. In 2001 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1996 her work, “The Youngest Parents,” was published by DoubleTake Books and The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in collaboration with Robert Coles and John Moses. In 2003, in conjunction with her exhibition at the Bernard Toale Gallery, she received an award for The Best Emerging Artist Exhibition in New England from the International Association of Art Critics/USA.

Her work has appeared in many national publications including The New York Times Magazine, DoubleTake and Harpers. Lee is a faculty member at Princeton University.

Museum hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday. Admission is $3 per person. There is no charge for museum members and UM students with a MaineCard. To obtain more information, call 561-3350.