Landscapes on display at UMMA

BANGOR – The University of Maine Museum of Art at 40 Harlow St. will present two exhibitions beginning Friday, July 13.

“Being Where: Looking Into Landscape” offers a variety of approaches to the ideal associated with landscape while stretching the traditional definition of what we hope a landscape is or really looks like.

“Millions Taken Daily: Photographs from Everyone and Everywhere” explores the idea that photographs are an integral part of daily life and we all have a hand in creating and collecting them.

“Being Where: Looking Into Landscape” presents, through various media including painting, printmaking and photography, the landscape as seen from 1860 to the present, as anywhere from a place to record and cherish, to a sublime ideal or even a place to be pitied.

The exhibition includes work by Marguerite Zorach, Andrew Wyeth, Neil Welliver, John Marin, Stephen Etnier, Eugene Atget, Emily Muir, Ralph Blakelock, Paul Caponigro, Frederick Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley and many younger, contemporary artists.

Throughout the history of art, work that deals with landscape has usually been two-dimensional and representational, such as paintings of fields, forests or other types of scenery.

The outcome of looking at a landscape painting, print or photograph often can be an episode of self-inflicted questioning. Much like the tenets of a journalist, the who, what, where and how of the work helps root the viewer “into” the landscape. Many of the works in this exhibition will pose that type of inquiry.

Yet other questions may suddenly occur because with closer inspection, all is not always what it seems. Works like George Inness’ “The Elm” and Beate Gutschow’s “LS #14” share very similar strategies even though they were made in very different media more than 135 years apart. They speak of the artist’s desire to create the perfect moment, the sublime landscape.

Inness employed the same elm tree over and over again because it was ideal and expedient, while painting not in the landscape itself but in the studio.

Gutschow fabricates her arcadia through “stitching” multiple photographs of various landscapes together. In each case, the finished work is not a depiction of a specific place. It is a sense of place.

“Being Where” offers landscapes that at times stretch the traditional definition of what we hope a landscape is or really looks like. Artists in the exhibition quietly expand the confines of what they observe before them.

They strive to “re-see” the world through diverse strategies. The emphasis is often beyond the specific task of recording reality. The landscape may act as a metaphor of dreams, fantasy or simply the will to reinterpret beyond recognition.

“Millions Take Daily: Photographs from Everyone and Everywhere” explores the concept that photographs are a central part of daily life and we all have a hand in creating and collecting them. This exhibition of thousands of works, installed floor to ceiling in the museum, has been submitted by people from all around the world.

Put a camera in the hands of most people and they’ll want to take photographs to remember their special occasions. Whether they chop off the heads of their loved ones or try to include so much background that they appear as ants at the Grand Canyon, these images become cherished memories.

Visualize the remains of the picnic from last year’s Fourth of July. See the boats floating on a picturesque bay as the family poses in the foreground for their vacation picture. Stand on the Empire State Building and look south toward where the Twin Towers used to be.

Stroll down the main street in Any Town, USA, and snap some shots. Capture the tiny glint of an airplane zooming others to far away places. Take that picture you always wanted, of the pyramids at dusk, or your child’s first smile. Freeze it forever. Such is the power of the photographic lens.

Both exhibitions will be in place through Saturday, Oct. 6.

Museum hours are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Admission is $3, no charge for museum members and UM students with MaineCard. For additional information, call 561-3350.