Blue: A Spatial Dialogue

The Barn Project is pleased to present: Blue: A Spatial Dialogue featuring sculptures and paintings by Maine-based Douglas Gimbel and New York-based Alejandra Seeber.

Anchoring the exhibition space are Gimbel’s totem-like sculptures titled Reflections. These are meticulously carved from white pine, with a rippling surface that accentuates the wood’s natural grain and gives the effect of the sculptures undulating upward. This body of work recalls the old pilings that jut out along the coastline where Gimbel lives and works, on an industrial site, the former grounds of the Knickerbocker Ice Works in BoothBay Harbor, Maine. In the nearly ten foot sculpture All is One, a piece of salvaged, old growth Mesquite is carved into two rectilinear forms spinning in opposite directions. The base resembles roots and contrasts with the top portion, a flower-like form, asserting a dichotomy between what’s above and below ground. In presenting this arrangement of monoliths, Gimbel suggests ghosts of a man-made past: the pilings, which once held docks, are now immovable vestiges rooted in a seascape that is continually impacted by man’s intervention and stumblings toward progress.

As though giving voice to this environment, Alejandra Seeber’s blown glass speech bubbles hang from the ceiling, interspersed throughout the gallery. They are solid, bulbous objects, Modernist shapes cartoony yet minimal in their execution. They lack any text so as to anticipate speech or ready an audience – instead, light dances through the glass and casts rays upon its surroundings. Seeber started making the speech bubbles while working with glassblowers in Murano, Italy. She chose the form for the way it signified her collaboration with the artisans, as though conjuring a speech bubble could itself encourage a fluid back-and-forth. When installed, the speech bubbles draw attention to parts of the gallery that might go otherwise overlooked, like conversations lost at a party. Despite their fragility, these works invite interaction and

facilitate, as Seeber intends, “a playful environment that creates a porous boundary between artwork and audience.”

In her painting Titled Something, Seeber pushes the motif into watery abstraction: chromatic speech bubbles layer upon one another and tessellate around the canvas to achieve a noisy, cumulative effect. These speech bubbles suggest light in their varying transparencies, and also become animated – pert breasts or upturned noses that jut into one another.

Gimbel draws from memories of landscape in his abstract paintings, fixing vistas or spatial relationships in his mind, and taking these back to the studio alongside an earthy palette of blues, greens, and browns. Flattening the picture plane, reducing the horizon or conventions of perspective, Gimbel offers horizontal and vertical marks, varied in their execution to be brash or lyrical, effusive or melancholic. Rubbing alcohol dripped over the paintings has a weathering effect that delivers the mysterious feeling of a Turner painting. Through material and gesture he reminds us of life cycles and sources – the cosmos, the deep sea – and urges us to spend time wrestling with these visions to see something altogether new.