UMaine Contemporary Art Exhibition ‘Without Borders’ Opens Aug. 22

Contact: Professor Owen F. Smith (207) 581-4389

ORONO — “Seriously, Funny,” the fifth iteration of the annual exhibition series “Without Borders,” a melding of culture, art and technology involving UMaine Intermedia graduate students and artists from around the country, opens Aug. 22 at Lord Hall Galleries.

The show runs through Sept. 26, with a public opening reception and a performance by artist and musician Jeremy Boyle, is scheduled Friday, Sept. 12, from 5-7 p.m. at Lord Hall on the University of Maine campus.

Over the last five years, the Without Borders Contemporary Art Festival has been an important part of the development of the Intermedia Master of Fine Arts at UMaine. Since the first show in 2004, the festival has brought together UMaine graduate students with professional artists from across the U.S. and the world to explore and present the evolving nature of creative expression. The event this year continues the tradition by focusing on the use of humor as a means to interrogate cultural, political and social concerns.

Seriously, Funny is sponsored by the Department of Art, the Department of New Media, the Intermedia Master of Fine Arts Program, the Graduate School, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Student Affairs.

Among this year’s participants are:

christophermichaelsullivan (CMS) (http://christophermichaelsullivan.com), an art firm that creates work analyzing how process, material and meaning circulate through society.

Jill Miller (http://www.jillmiller.net), a San Francisco-based artist renowned for her performance and installation work, is contributing “I am Making Art, Too,” a video-performance that remixes seminal conceptual artist John Baldassari’s “I am Making Art” with Miller’s break-dancing moves over rapper Missy Elliott’s “Work It” to raise questions about women’s roles in art history, authorship, appropriation, and the nature of the artistic gesture in video art.

The Institute for Infinitely Small Things conducts creative, participatory research that aims to temporarily transform public spaces dominated by non-public agendas. Using performance and conversation, the artists investigate social and political “tiny things,” including corporate ads, street names and post-9/11 security terminology.

Karen Hanmer (http://www.karenhanmer.com), a Chicago bookbinder and installation artists whose work weds the ancient act of bookbinding with the high-tech use of the computer to aid her process. Her works often take the forms of games or puzzles, and many include witty text.

Lewis Colburn, a graduate student at Syracuse University, whose work focuses on hypothetical narratives that combine miscommunications, humor and familiar actions with repurposed objects, video, performance, photography and sculpture to forge new stories of everyday life.

Amy Jean Porter (http://www.amyjeanporter.com), a visual artist from New Haven, Conn., whose work in this year’s exhibit, “Birds of North Africa Speak French and English Both at Once,” combines natural history illustration and linguistic blurriness to create new, irreverent takes on everyday situations and circumstances.

Laura Nova, a visual artist in video, sculpture and installation, whose work is rooted in social relationships and literalized emotions. Using the gallery and site-specific spaces, she creates installations using a wide range of media to explore concepts of public and private behavior and the relationship between the human body and architecture.

Sheridan Kelley, a UMaine assistant professor who works across a wide-stratum of media, from her classical training in painting to performance and video artworks. Kelley is contributing two video works: “World’s Strongest Man,” and “I am Waiting.”

UMaine graduate student Tyler McPhee, a co-curator of Without Borders V, recently completed an installation, “Crikey!” for Seriously, Funny. Employing a sense of humor in his work, McPhee, in Crikey!, investigates the museum as a site of artistic experience through an imaginary natural history museum alligator diorama.

Justin Kemp, a recent MFA graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Justin presents a multiple video work to the show, focusing on the intersection of new media technologies with human social interaction, art historical critique and irreverent mash-ups of song and mapping technology.

Jeremy Boyle (http://jeremyboyle.com), a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is a multi-media artist who works across sound, sculpture and performance. He or, rather, his self-playing drum set and guitar will perform at the reception Sept. 12.