PEMBROKE — The A.D. Gallery at UNC Pembroke will present a solo exhibition of the work of Gail Spaien, beginning Thursday, Aug. 29.
The exhibition will be on display through Sept. 27. An opening reception will be held at 12:30 p.m. on Aug. 29. The A.D. Gallery is located in Locklear Hall.
The exhibition, Cottage Bonzai, investigates the presence and meaning of utopia in the everyday. Inspired by a summer stays in a rustic generational Maine home on an island in Casco Bay, this new series of paintings, tells a love story of place and season.
Capturing the essence of hypnotic vistas on a reduced scale, the paintings are bonsais of lived experience. Compressing the magical qualities of space and time, Spaien reframes the view to suggest the desire for, and the impossibility of sustaining such perfect conditions.
Spaien has been the recipient of numerous fellowships including the Djerassi Foundation Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California; Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, New York; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; among many others.
A professor of painting and core faculty in the MFA program at the Maine College of Art, Spaien received her BFA from the University of Southern Maine and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
“Inspired by the symbolism, contradiction and pleasure embedded in the traditions of American folk art, Dutch floral painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the landscape paintings of the Hudson River School, I make paintings that depict an idealized view of nature and home,” Spaien said.
For more information on the gallery, the exhibition, or the artists, please contact A.D. Gallery Director, Joseph Begnaud, at 910-521-6405 or email joseph.begnaud@uncp.edu.
