FARMINGTON — The University of Maine at Farmington will present the work of artist Juliet Karelsen “Juliet’s Room: Recent Work by Juliet Karelsen,” Feb. 2 through March 12 at UMF Art Gallery, 246 Main St.

An opening reception will be held from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 2.

This free exhibition brings together several recent series of Karelsen’s asrtworks in mediums as diverse as gouache and needlepoint as she affectionately explores memory, loss and unexpected instants of life.

After her father’s death in 2013, Karelsen dismantled her parents’ New York apartment, her childhood home. Her embroidered pill bottles and delicate portraits of the figurines that graced her mother’s mirrored vanity speak both to her parents’ last years and their more glamorous youth. What unites the work, along with Karelsen’s idiosyncratic vision and humor, is the attention to surfaces as ornamental overlays of personal history and private memory.

Karelsen’s needlework lichen “paintings” writhe and dance or sit in solid silence through the seasons as their colors burst and wane. She studies each tiny plot in minute detail and renders them with expressionist force, a record of an intense encounter between the artist and the lichen, mosses, fungi, flowers and ferns inhabiting each diminutive stage.

In the “Joyous Cosmology” series of gouache paintings on paper, Karelsen borrows characters from the fantastical, violent stories told in the prints of Hokusai and Yoshitoshi and Henry Darger’s “In the Realms of the Unreal” and places them in flat, cooly ornamental worlds composed of Katz and Warhol flowers.

Gallery hours are noon-4 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday and by appointment. For more information or to make an appointment, contact Sarah Maline at maline@maine.edu or 778-1062 or visit artgalleryumf.org.

Copy the Story Link