February 5 – March 21, 2025
Crewe Center for the Arts
111 Bedford Street
Portland, Maine 04103
Of Sibyls and Source: Ranges and Ruptures is an exhibition of sculpture, textiles, video, and live performances that investigates ideas surrounding oracles, community, mapping, landscape, and geo-mythic space. Moving through the world as artists, we become strangers and pilgrims in the broad sense, separated from home or daily life and traversing physical and cultural landscapes. These new locations awaken a sense of place when we are out-of-place. Sibyls, or oracles, are born of a rupture, an opening in the earth that speaks to something profound that we may feel intensely, but cannot fully understand.
Of Sibyls and Source: Ranges and Ruptures is a collection of work made in dialogue with the sites of Monti Sibillini National Park in Umbria, Italy, and Acadia National Park in Maine. These creative gestures tenderly explore the possibility in timespace for mountains to touch, for springs to flow into each other, and for horizons to merge.
Meet the artists
Susan Bickford is a Maine artist working with ecosomatics within the tenets of deep ecology. Bickford’s “Invoking the Muses” are nine handmade blue cotton dresses that listen to, translate, and make visible the live language of the air currents within this place. She will also show a video piece made in both Italy and Maine. Bickford holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts/Bachelor of Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Master of Fine Arts from the Maine College of Art & Design. She has been teaching art at the University of Maine, Augusta, since 2003. Selected exhibition venues include The Portland Museum of Art Biennial, SPACE Gallery, Bates College IMStudio, SPEEDWELL Gallery, The Maine International Film Festival, the Picnic Pavillion, Venice Italy.
Samantha Jones is a materials-based installation artist living in Blue Hill, Maine. She is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Maine, holding a PhD from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in Visual Art in Portland and a Master of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. In Of Sibyls and Source: Ranges and Ruptures, she enters into a vital surrealist dialogue with the living material of stone, paper, felt, trees, mountains, and water, including a 90 ft. silk velvet piece entitled In the Belly of the Whale, spanning the length of the Crewe Center. Selected exhibition venues include: The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME, The University of Maine, Farmington, 3S Artspace, NH, Grace College, IN, and Governor’s Island, NY. She is represented by Amos Eno Gallery in New York.
Heather Lyon (she/her) created the Of Sibyls and Source residencies and is an artist and educator living in Blue Hill, Maine. Her site-responsive performance, video, and textiles are an embodied inquiry into the sublime. For Of Sibyls and Source: Ranges and Ruptures, Lyon attunes to and channels the languages of the land. Her work includes large-format fabric cyanotypes of hybrid beings and performances in caves, on mountaintops, and in bodies of water. Lyon is a lifelong student of transcendental meditation and indigenous mystical traditions. She holds both a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Selected exhibition venues include deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; The State Silk Museum, Tbilisi, Georgia and Lichtenberg Studios in der Museums-Lounge, Berlin, Germany.
Kristin Mariani’s practice is an ongoing conversation between art and design. Acknowledging the slippery distinctions between the two disciplines, her investigations unfold in this unstable territory. Based in Chicago, Kristin creates works for performance and installation, deploying aesthetic strategies, skill-based knowledge, and text to probe the historical, material, and labor-oriented underpinnings encapsulated in any effort to clothe a body. Recent projects include a costume commission for PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity at the 19th Venice Biennale of Architecture. Of Sibyls and Source: Ranges and Ruptures provides a plateau for Kristin to explore the fugitive nature of the Sibyls’ oracles as a condition of utterance and embodiment of echo with an installation of found-object figure studies encircling a brick hearth.
misael soto (they/them) is an artist, educator, and organizer based in Miami, Florida. Their artistic practice interrogates and subverts contextually associated everyday objects and systemic roles, disrupting and manipulating space, systems, and frameworks. Born in Puerto Rico (1986), misael received their Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018). While in residence with the City of Miami Beach’s Department of Environment and Sustainability, misael founded the Department of Reflection. misael is the founder of artist solidarity collective Artists for Artists: Miami, an ongoing effort that has led to various initiatives, including the Miami Artist Census. For Of Sibyls and Source: Ranges and Ruptures, misael will present a temporary public concrete sculpture made in situ via a durational performative installation.
Guest Artists: Firefly the Hybrid (Bangor, Maine), Douglas Paisley (Brooklyn, NY), Ken Hoffmann (Blue Hill, Maine), Andrea Goodman (Trevet, Maine), Robin Lane (Portland, Maine) Matt Shaw (Blue Hill, Maine)
Join us for this exhibition’s associated events:
| Opening celebration Thursday, February 5 | 12 pm onward | Durational performance by misael soto on the terrace in front of the Crewe Center for the Arts |
| 5:30 – 7:30 pm | Opening reception | |
| 6 pm | Performance by Kristin Mariani in the exhibition hall | |
| 6:30 pm | Performance by invited artist Firefly the Hybrid in the Arts Lab | |
| Healing musical ensemble and astrological reading Friday, February 20th | 5 – 6 pm | On the event of the Neptune / Saturn conjunction at 0 degrees Aries. Susan Bickford with invited artists Andrea Goodman and Robin Lane in the Arts Lab. |
| Film screening and artists’ roundtable Friday, March 13th | 6 – 7 pm | Film and video Screening with work by Matt Shaw and Heather Lyon, Sam Jones, misael soto, Susan Bickford, and Kristin Mariani in the performance hall |
| 7 – 8 pm | Artist’s Roundtable, generously sponsored by the Maine Humanities Council | |
| Artist Performance Friday, March 20th | 6 – 7 pm | Performance by The Alpine Theatre of Peculiar Dreams, Samantha Jones and Heather Lyon with invited artist Doug Paisley, audio, in the performance hall |