Ilulissat, Disko Bugt, 2021, in progress studio view, graphite, spray paint, and acrylic paint, Dimensions are variable, © Peter Soriano, Photo by Alan Wiener
By Michaela Cavallaro
From our March 2022 issue
On a map, Maine may look isolated, hemmed in by an ocean and an international border, adjoining just one other state, but Jaime DeSimone, a curator of contemporary art at the Portland Museum of Art, would have you believe it’s anything but. With the inaugural North Atlantic Triennial, running at the PMA through June 5, she and her counterparts from museums in Iceland and Sweden propose a new way of seeing the map — a vision they call “Down North.” The term is a play on an old nautical reference that gave this magazine its name, and the larger idea is a sort of international regionalism, seeking to highlight and build cultural affinities among northerly peoples.
Pulling in artists from Maine to the Faroe Islands to Finland seemed natural, DeSimone says, since denizens of the far–Northern Hemisphere share a certain hardiness of character and dependence on the sea. Plus, there’s a lot going on across the north that’s relevant worldwide, and the triennial gives particular attention to climate change and indigenous rights, themes that DeSimone says emerged organically. Peter Soriano, for instance, a Philippines-born French-American sculptor started out studying the rate at which snowdrifts melted in his backyard, in the small town of Penobscot, then went to watch icebergs as they drifted off the coast of Greenland. For the triennial, he translated his observations into arresting, schematic-like wall drawings, an evocative flurry of lines and angles.
Left to right: Skaftafell–Pia I, 2021, 48×60 in., Courtesy of the artist, © Arngunnur Ýr, Photo by Bára Kristinsdóttir; Vertical Migration, 2019, slip colored ceramic on ash wood pallets, 126x47x50 in., Courtesy of Superflex, Installation view; maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, © Courtesy of EDP Foundation, Photo by Francisco Nogueira.
Superflex, a Danish arts collective, contributed a fanciful take on increasingly unstable thresholds between human and aquatic environments: wooden pallets stacked with maze-like blocks that are laced with openings that look like entry points for venturesome fish. The exhibition also includes work from several indigenous artists, including Julie Edel Hardenberg, a Greenlandic Inuit artist who stitched Denmark’s red-and-white flag with black hair, an expression of the complex, often troubled relationship between the Inuit and the country of Greenland, part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
Cultural exchange between Mainers and subarctic and arctic peoples picked up in 2013, when Eimskip, the Icelandic shipping company, located its North American headquarters in Portland, making the city a key juncture in northern commerce. A wave of international concerts, beer festivals, and economic summits ensued. That all prompted the PMA’s leadership to rethink what had been a long-running biennial exhibition of contemporary Maine artists, and they ended up partnering with the Reykjavik Art Museum and the Bildmuseet, in Umeå, Sweden. The project was delayed a full year by the pandemic, and it also faced some public opposition, including from former PMA director Daniel O’Leary. The overarching concern was twofold: that ending the biennial violated the intent of the donors who established it and that opportunities for Maine artists would be diminished.
Left to right: Katarina Pirak Sikku vuorkkás: Birága ja Klementssone johtolagat ja máddariid boazomearkkat / From Katarina Pirak Sikku’s archive: Pirak’s and Klementsson’s hiking trails and ancestral reindeer marks, 2021, 57×76 in., Courtesy of the artist, © Katarina Pirak Sikku, Photo by Piera Niilá Stålka; Birds Shed Feathers–Peskewikús, from 13 Moons: Full Suite, 2020, 24×24 in., Portland Museum of Art, Museum purchase with support from the Contemporary Art Fund, 2021.13.1-13, © Jordan Bennett, Photo by Luc Demers
For her part, DeSimone notes that seven of the show’s 30 artists are Mainers and that their work will travel to Reykjavik and Umeå after the Portland show closes. Showcasing Maine artists remains at the core of what the museum is doing, she says. “I can’t think of any better way than creating an international context for their work.”
At the Portland Museum of Art, Down North: North Atlantic Triennial runs through June 5. 7 Congress Sq., Portland. 207-775-6148.
