FARMINGTON — The Emery Community Arts Center on the University of Maine at Farmington campus will open “Myth & Mirth,” its first Flex Space Gallery exhibit of the academic year. The exhibition will be on display from Monday, Aug. 26, to Friday, Nov. 8, at the center on Academy Street.  A public reception will be held from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 12, at the gallery.

Exhibit curator Jesse Potts will give a free and open to the public gallery talk at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 8.

“Myth and Mirth” is an exhibition of four artists whose methods combine playful uses of humor, material and storytelling to create works filled with mythical and historical elements and quasi-cultural artifacts. This collection of sculptural works is filled with absurd visual representations of creatures and cultural references, puns and pseudo-recognizable objects whose combined effect reveals the curious, the bizarre, unforetold narratives and future myths.

Andrew Brehm’s “Tusk” combines a Dr. Seuss inspired beast pelt with a shag bathmat, creating an object that feels eerily familiar to one’s inner child, but is void of a specific time and place. In “Mummy Bag” Leslie Rogers, mixes traditional quilting techniques and historical modes of mummification. She states, “The domestic interior, in all of its comfort and nostalgia, is haunted with obscured, overlooked, or un-favored narratives and explanations.” She hopes that, “these quilt works will embody the ethnographies of their traditional form.”

Ryan Kelly blends cultural references and conflates language in his paper-mache “Self-portrait as Bearskin Rug.” For Kelly, “this piece is also a self-portrait; an object; the likeness of the flayed outer skin that I wear, that other people regard me through. It is my comical step back to examine myself as a hairy gay man, a “bear” in the queer community.”

Peter Morgan’s ceramic sculptures, such as “Killer M(orca)roni and Cheese,” present humorous mashups of food, landscape and animals, including those extinct and imagined, that illustrate absurd scenarios and mixed metaphors. Morgan states that, “these ceramic sculptures transform everyday food items into vast landscapes, while conversely shifting massive objects into toy-sized replicas. Through its macro/micro shift, this series seeks to morph the familiar into the grandiose, while bringing into question the viewer’s position within the universe.”

Gallery hours are noon-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

For more information, contact Ann Bartges, director of Emery Cmmunity Arts Center, at ann.bartges@maine.edu or 778-7461.

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