🌷 Calling all Maine artists
Submit your work to our 2024 Open Call
Lights Out Gallery is thrilled to invite emerging and established artists to participate in our 2024 Open Call.
The selected artists will have the opportunity to showcase their artwork in future exhibitions, artist features, and residencies. We are committed to discovering and promoting talent in Maine's art scene and are looking forward to reviewing your submissions. Thank you for your interest, and we can't wait to see your work!
Interview with artist Jessica Gandolf
"Sometimes, after making an abstract oil painting, I begin to sense that a body is ready to enter the painting. This body drops in from above or below in any number of ways. I sense that the painting “catches’ the figure and the dance between figure and ground begins. This tension is really the subject of the painting. The figure might be indicated by contour line or be fully three dimensional. In either case they stand in contrast to the flat shapes that surround and fill them. Using feet adds the suggestion of a ground plane." –Jessica Gandolf
Born and raised in New York City, Jessica Gandolf has lived in Portland for 30 years. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MA from Brooklyn College where she studied with Lois Dodd and Lee Bontecou. She received an NEA Regional Fellowship in Painting in 1994. She has been awarded residencies at MacDowell (twice) and at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Hewnoaks and Cummington Community for the Arts. She has been a Lecturer at Bowdoin College and Bates College. She has exhibited across the country and at several venues internationally.
Lights Out Gallery gifts a treasure trove of interviews with contemporary Maine artists to Colby’s digital archives
“As part of its strategy to expand and share its digital collections around art, music, and other Maine subcultures, Colby Libraries’ Digital Initiatives Division is archiving Lights Out Gallery’s video interviews with Maine artists that began during the early days of the pandemic and have continued in the years since.
The Maine-based art gallery began recording the interviews in winter 2020 and recently gave its collection of more than 80 artist interviews, most conducted in artists’ creative spaces, to Colby for widespread public distribution and consumption, as well as for campus learning.
Matt LeVan, Colby’s digital archives librarian, was immediately intrigued…”
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