Charles Danforth Gallery
Jewett Hall, Â鶹APP
May 4 – May 23, 2024

Opening Reception and Artist Talk in the Danforth Gallery,

Immediately following Commencement on May 4, 2024, at Noon

The graduating Art students of the Â鶹APP will exhibit their senior thesis artwork in the Charles Danforth Gallery on Â鶹APP Augusta campus in an exhibition entitled Trust the Process. The exhibition includes the work of seven artists and will open at noon with a public reception immediately after Commencement on Saturday, May 4.

Trust the Process reflects the evolution of each artist’s concepts and work over the past semester, using the tools of self- and faculty-critiques. Exhibiting artists include Emily Allen, Julia Dry, Des Dumais, Bruce Forbes, Donald L. Patten, Sophia Reyes, and Jared Winslow.

Trust the Process is on view from May 4 – May 23, 2024, and the public is welcome to visit the gallery in Jewett Hall, which is open on Mondays through Fridays from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. The UMA community and the general public are invited to the opening reception and artist talk on May 4 at noon.

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Artist Biographies

Emily Allen (Gardiner, Maine): Emily Allen is an aspiring illustrator who works primarily in 2-dimensions with media ranging from graphite and paint to digital drawings. Over the past three years, Emily developed a story that she is translating into a graphic novel. Several completed pages for this novel, along with a myriad of her preparatory sketches for this work are on view in the exhibition. After graduation, Emily will pursue a master’s degree in illustration, eventually publishing her complete graphic novel.

Julia Dry (Hallowell, Maine): Julia Dry is a mixed media artist who primarily works with sterling silver, enamel, and copper to create sculptures and jewelry pieces. While the subject of her work is often changing, her love for color has stayed consistent. Julia’s process centers experimentation and research to better understand her chosen materials. She hopes to pursue a master’s degree after graduation.

Des Dumais (Fort Kent, Maine): Des Dumais is a tattoo artist. She moved from Fort Kent to Augusta to pursue her dream of being a tattoo artist. Her fine arts education has given Des the tools and knowledge to excel in her career. Des creates tattoos that not only adorn the skin, but also resonate with the spirit within. Each session is an opportunity to forge a connection, leaving a mark that transcends the physical and becomes a part of the wearer’s identity.

Bruce Forbes (Philipsburg, Pennsylvania): Bruce Forbes is a photographer who moved to Augusta long ago for work reasons. He focuses on portraiture, but also engages in landscape photography, especially scenes from the Kennebec River and the city of Augusta. Bruce also pursues street photography during warmer weather. He brings his training in composition and color to his photographic work. In addition to his portraiture and landscape work, he hopes to photograph a series centered upon truck stops this summer.

Donald L. Patten (Belfast, Maine): Donald is a draftsman, oil painter, and ceramicist. In the past, old master painters would depict historically significant disasters that happened to them to cope. A student of the old masters, Donald has made a series of drawings that represent his pandemic experiences by referencing past masterpieces that depict the embodied experience of trauma. After graduating, he will display oil paintings and ceramic artworks at several art markets around Maine before pursuing an MFA degree.

Sophia Reyes (Houston, Texas): Sophia is an interdisciplinary artist residing in Maine. The Houston, Texas native primarily works with photography, digital art, and printmaking. With photography being her first love, she centers her printmaking practice on captured memories using the aid of digital tools and traditional printmaking techniques to bring these images to life. Her work explores the themes of home and identity through the navigation and reflection of personal narratives and experiences of a first generation Mexican American.

Jared Winslow (New Sharon, Maine): Jared is a mixed media artist who works primarily with inks, gouache and watercolor to create fine drawings and illustrations. Jared’s works feature a wide range of subjects, but one consistent theme is his passion for nature and plant life. His artistic process involves finding inspiration by immersing himself in natural environments, sketching intricate details, and then experimenting with compositions. His approach allows him to layer materials. After graduation, he hopes to pursue his master’s degree.

2023 UMA Senior Thesis Exhibition

May 6, 2023 – August 11, 2023

Opening reception: May 6, 2023 12 – 2 p.m.

The Â鶹APP is proud to present the 2023 UMA Senior Thesis Exhibition: Ouroboros and Ostinato featuring student artists Tayla Knapp and Courtney Harmon. The opening reception begins May 6th with a noontime reception immediately following Â鶹APP Commencement ceremony, and explores the processes of the body and the mind in both psychological and physical processes of change. Knapp’s portion of the exhibition, Ouroboros, centers metamorphosis through fluent line that bridges anatomical studies with graphic storytelling, while Harmon’s Ostinato translates the creative influence of music on the mind and psyche into three-dimensional paintings that bridge musical and visual experience through form and metaphor.

Tayla Knapp is a Liberal Studies Major and Art Minor student at UMA with a passion for finding the beauty in the macabre through illustration. Her work for Ouroboros includes fifteen drawings and paintings exploring the process of transformation using the body and its metamorphosis through cycles of life and death.

Courtney Harmon is an Art Major at UMA who’s passionate about changing the face of therapy in Maine. Hoping to pursue a career in art therapy, her work for Ostinato includes six sculptural painting installations focused on and influenced by the affects of music on the mind and creative process. The themes of these pieces reflect current and ongoing issues of the human condition including consumerism, addiction, and mental health.

With these two artists together, the exhibition Ouroboros and Ostinato reflects the circular themes of music and the body. Knapp’s work addresses the outward surreal metamorphosis of the body through life to death, while Harmon’s opens onto the creative interior workings of the mind during embodied experiences of music. Knapp’s graphic and illustrative approach, and Harmon’s circular canvases and multimedia 3D sculptural elements play on the beauty in the sometimes macabre or imperfect cycles that, in the space of the gallery, open onto the nearly limitless creative possibilities through which our bodies and minds circulate.

The exhibition is on display from May 6 – Aug 11, and the public is welcome to visit the gallery in Jewett Hall, which is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. The UMA community and the general public are invited to the opening reception on Saturday, May 6th from 12 – 2 p.m., immediately following the Â鶹APP’s commencement ceremonies. Refreshments will be served, and the artists will offer brief comments on their work.

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Opening Reception and Artist Talk in the Danforth Gallery
Saturday, May 14, 2022, from 12 – 2 p.m.

Each spring the Charles Danforth Gallery at the Â鶹APP (UMA) exhibits the work of its graduating art majors, who complete their studies at the university with a final year-long body of work. This year’s show, titled Start to Finish, features works in illustration, graphic design, painting, drawing, and collage. This year’s artists are Creed Griffin, Cassidy Penney, and Sally Wagley.

Creed Griffin is an illustrator from Camden, Maine who is developing the illustrations for a children’s book, Boy in the Brambles, in collaboration with writer Michele Cox. The story follows a young boy and his dog who venture out into the woods and get caught in a storm.

Cassidy Penney is an artist who lives in China, Maine. Her vibrantly colored work focuses on mountain landscapes through a mix of painting and graphic design. She highlights her view of the natural world and her emotional responses through these two media in a series titled “Energetic Peacefulness.”

Sally Wagley is a mixed-media artist from Brunswick, Maine who explores her struggles with insomnia through a series of pastel drawings and photo collages which couple images of a restless female figure with text, symbols, and images reminiscent of both Renaissance art and features of modern technology.

The exhibit will feature the finished artworks as well as information on the artists’ creative processes: labor-intensive work entailing research, preliminary sketches, and much trial and error.

The exhibition is on display from May 6 – 26, and the public is welcome to visit the gallery in Jewett Hall, which is open from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. The UMA community and the general public are invited to the opening reception on Saturday, May 14th from 12 – 2 p.m., immediately following the Â鶹APP’s commencement ceremonies. Refreshments will be served, and the artists will talk about their work.

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Charles Danforth Gallery in Â鶹APP Jewett Hall

September 2 – October 2, 2020

Recently-graduated Art students at the Â鶹APP who exhibited their works in an all-online Virtual Senior Thesis Exhibition in May are pleased to now exhibit their senior thesis projects on the Danforth Gallery’s walls. The five artists, Marcea Crawford, Shana Rowe Jackson, Evan Lord Martin, Jenn Messier, and Becky Pass spent months preparing their thesis projects, first in Â鶹APP studios, and then in their home studios as campus access was limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In recognition of the challenging times in which their exhibition has taken place virtually and in-person, they have titled their exhibition Phantasmagoria: a term the dictionary defines as “a sequence of real or imaginary images like those seen in a dream.” In its transition from virtual to actual space, Â鶹APP Senior Thesis Exhibition Phantasmagoria marks not only the accomplishment of the artists whose works it exhibits, but the strange passage between the real and dreamlike that has attended much of the COVID era.

Encompassing a wide variety of media, formats, and scales, the works included in this year’s exhibition are, as artist Becky Pass explains, “built on endurance.” Pass, whose mixed-media paintings on linen bath blankets convey her experiences of the daily struggles with anxiety, depression, and PTSD in her works, says the colorful blankets “represent the disorder and chaos [she] experienced, while shape and line bring balance to these compositions, restoring […] a semblance of order.”

Marcea Crawford’s five eight-foot large wheat-paste murals powerfully reflect Crawford’s experiences with domestic abuse and her survival. Jenn Messier’s works, exhibited in the Danforth Gallery on an over-scaled papier-mâché refrigerator door, frame “surrealistic domestic scenarios” wrought from the disconnect between the slick perfection of America’s consumerist fantasy and the more complicated and uncomfortable realities that transitions, from childhood to adulthood to parenthood, can bring.

Evan Lord Martin has a sensory processing disorder that can render the world “a fury of mental and somatic noise;” his video works seek “to articulate unrefined states of mind without using words in a traditional way.” Lastly, Shana Rowe Jackson’s series of realistically-rendered skies frame an idealized plane high and perfect above the challenges below. “Through creating, I have been able to move past the negativity in my life,” Jackson writes, “I create the world that I want to see.”

These works, forged from the artists’ individual experiences, artistic training, and many hundreds of hours of work in the studio, showed, in the spring, how this year’s graduates turned difficulty to art. Now viewable in person, Phantasmagoria transforms these artists’ visions from virtual to real.

Phantasmagoria: 2020 UMA Senior Thesis Exhibition is on view in the Danforth Gallery in Â鶹APP Jewett Hall from September 2 – October 2, 2020. The gallery is open, while requiring face coverings be worn and a physical distance of six feet between people be maintained at all times, from 9 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday.

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Images provided:

Danforth Thesis Fall 2020 Photo 1 – Installation View: Jenn Messier, “Domestic Theater” 16 drawings framed by papier-mâchĂ© refrigerator

Danforth Thesis Fall 2020 Photo 2 – Artist Marcela Crawford with her wheat-pasted murals “The Storm,” “Peacock,” and “Dragon Lady,” installed on the exterior walls of Â鶹APP Jewett Hall.

Danforth Thesis Fall 2020 Photo 3 – Becky Pass, “Lament” – Mixed Media

Graduating Art students at the Â鶹APP are exhibiting their works in an all-online Virtual Senior Thesis Exhibition beginning May 9. The virtual exhibition will be followed by a bricks-and-mortar exhibition in the Charles Danforth Gallery set to open September 6, 2020. The five artists, Marcea Crawford, Shana Rowe Jackson, Evan Lord Martin, Jenn Messier, and Becky Pass have spent months preparing their thesis projects, first in Â鶹APP studios, and then in their home studios as campus access was limited due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The all-online Virtual Senior Thesis Exhibition highlights the perseverance, resilience, and creative achievements of this year’s graduates in extraordinary times.

Encompassing a wide variety of media, formats, and scales, the works included in this year’s exhibition are, as artist Becky Pass explains, “built on endurance.” Pass, whose mixed-media paintings on linen bath blankets convey her experiences of the daily struggles with anxiety, depression, and PTSD in her works, says the colorful blankets “represent the disorder and chaos [she] experienced, while shape and line bring balance to these compositions, restoring […] a semblance of order.”

Marcea Crawford’s five eight-foot large wheat-paste murals powerfully reflect Crawford’s experiences with domestic abuse and her survival.

Jenn Messier’s works frame “surrealistic domestic scenarios” wrought from the disconnect between the slick perfection of fashion magazines and the more complicated and uncomfortable realities that transitions, from childhood to adulthood to parenthood, can bring.

Evan Lord Martin has a sensory processing disorder that can render the world “a fury of mental and somatic noise;” his video works seek “to articulate unrefined states of mind without using words in a traditional way.”

Lastly, Shana Rowe Jackson’s series of realistically-rendered skies frame an idealized plane high and perfect above the challenges below. “Through creating, I have been able to move past the negativity in my life,” Jackson writes, “I create the world that I want to see.”

These works, forged from the artists’ individual experiences, artistic training, and many hundreds of hours of work in the studio, are well-suited to our time. Now exhibited in the virtual sphere we all occupy in these physically-distant times, this year’s Virtual Senior Thesis Exhibition shows how this year’s graduates have, before the pandemic era and during, turned difficulty to art.

The 2020 Virtual Senior Thesis Exhibition is on view at . The virtual exhibition will be followed by an exhibition in the Charles Danforth Gallery opening on September 6, 2020, at 3:00 p.m.

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Charles Danforth Gallery • Jewett Hall, Â鶹APP
May 11th – 31st, 2019

Opening Reception in the Danforth Gallery
Saturday, May 11th   12:00pm – 2:00pm

AUGUSTA – Each spring the final art exhibit of the academic year at the Â鶹APP (UMA) is the .  This year’s show, entitled Story of Us, highlights each artist’s individuality through an array of media and explores the concept of personal narratives.  The artworks include fiber arts, graphic design, graphic storytelling, mixed media, painting, photography, sculpture, upcycled media, and wheatpaste murals.  This year’s exhibiting artists are Kimberly Baker, Dianne Chicoine, Jenna Clifford, Marcea Crawford, Lisa Hodgkins, and Jessica Morton, and each one presents a body of work developed throughout the year as part of the thesis project.

UMA Illustrative Artist— Jessica Morton’s “Melissa’s Story: How I Got Here” as part of the Story of Us.”

The UMA Art Program offers a Bachelor’s Degree in studio art with courses in drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, design, printmaking, electronic arts, and photography, and this year’s art seniors have taken these skills one-step further.

Kimberly Baker a “photographer and artist from Ashland, Maine…emphasizes on the memories that flow through her mind while driving on familiar roadways.”

Dianne Chicoine of West Gardiner focuses “on sculptural fiber art and the absent body.  Her thesis work is a narrative of her inner transformational journey represented in mixed media sculpture.”

Jenna Clifford of Vassalboro “a graphic artist and designer…focuses on the emotional journey of her everyday struggle with Type I diabetes.”

Illustrative artist, Jessica Morton of Waterville, showcases “a painted excerpt of her current working project, a visual novel.”

Lisa Hodgkins of Jefferson “explores the beauty and spirit of the female face, nature, and loving relationships using mixed media, stylized portraits with iconic relevance.”

Marcea Crawford of Lisbon “is a public muralist…[whose] wheatpaste work is a representation of the biological and chemical responses resulting from an embrace. She uses markers, digital media and paper.”

Families of the students, the UMA community and the general public are also invited to the opening reception on Saturday, May 11^th from 12:00pm to 2:00pm, following the Â鶹APP’s graduation and commencement ceremonies.  Refreshments will be served.

The Exhibition will be on display from May 11^th through May 31^st, and the public is welcome to visit the gallery in Jewett Hall, which is open on Mondays through Thursdays from 9:00am to 5:00pm and on Fridays from 9:00am to 4:00pm.

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