Join us for the exhibition opening on October 3, 2024.
under/current is a 2024 exhibition taking place at the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery. Featuring artist Stephanie Garon, the show examines the potential effects of a proposed mine on the town of Pembroke, Maine. Utilizing techniques that place materials and community experience at the foreground of this exhibit’s interpretive lens, Garon’s work is a scientifically grounded artistic investigation into an environmental bequeathment that poses both opportunity and hazard to many rural Maine communities. Contemplating the question of what to do — if anything — with our more-than-earthly elemental inheritance raises questions of land claim, environmentally-dependent livelihoods, and economic opportunity. At the center of these issues is an entanglement of the imperative of lessening our collective fossil-fuel dependence uncomfortably enmeshed with extractive and potentially environmentally threatening processes.
Garon utilizes an emphasis on material as her point of departure for artistic investigation. She recently acquired a 20,000-rock core collection from a previous mining project in the Pembroke area. under/current explores issues around land claim and mining’s impact on one local economy driven by fishing, clean water, and environmental stability. Although we focus on Pembroke, the economic and ecological intertwinement seen here can be viewed as a microcosm of the concerns that face many communities throughout the New England-Acadian Forest ecoregion. Approaching her project from an object-based perspective allows the artist to create an immersive, site-specific installation with a humble elemental material at its center.
Garon considers the rock for where it intersects with another earthly inherited element: water. Intertwined with security, both corporal and economic, water is where extractive mining processes hold their most significant and potentially detrimental impact. When considering the effects of a proposed local mine, Garon interviewed those whose livelihoods place them in constant contact with water for bodily sustenance and economic security. She spoke with kelp farmers and clam diggers on their changing industries. Garon’s contacts at NASA and the Urban Sails Institute further contextualize the perspectives of these professionals, allowing for the exhibit to toggle between macrocosmic climate-based phenomena and the hyper-local scale of individual lived experience.
The artist grounds her investigation with a collaborative sound piece created with members of the local Passamaquoddy tribe. Considering the sound of our environment and how vibrations mix and mingle to offer a distinct experience of elemental situatedness adds another layer of sensorial experience to the show.
We have a collective responsibility dictated by our material situatedness to listen and understand one another as a community and reach informed decisions around questions of land claim and elemental use. Many Maine towns are currently making decisions around lithium mining for the cell phones and car batteries that power our contemporary lives, marking these questions with an ever-increasing urgency. under/current provides an exhibition and attendant programming that allows audiences to contemplate how the environment intertwines with our everyday lived experience. Specifically, we examine how the choices Mainers make around environmental stewardship hold a potential impact on our economic and environmental surroundings, thereby affecting our perception of our natural surroundings and material circumstances all through what is scientifically grounded, monetizable, and possibly detrimental, that lies in our mountains and beneath our feet.
— Kat Zagaria Buckley, Director of Art Exhibitions and Outreach
This exhibition is made possible by the generosity of the Margaret E. Burnham Charitable Trust and the Maine Humanities Council.
Above: Still from Stephanie Garon, Scattered Trees on a Storm-Swept Plain, 2023. Single channel video, 8 min 28 sec.