Chris Faust • Kristin Malin • Breehan James
November 9, 2024 – January 4, 2025
Opening Reception:
Friday, November 15 at 3:56pm
[at the rising of the Full Beaver Supermoon]
“Because it’s up there.” –Lois Dodd
What better place to gaze at the moon than in Maine?
The list of Maine-based artists who have painted moonscapes is long and glittering (Lois Dodd, Marsden Hartley, Katherine Bradford, Alex Katz, etc.). Drive-by Projects is pleased to present Maine Moons, an exhibition including paintings by three artists whose works are love poems to the Maine moon: Chris Faust, Breehan James, and Kristin Malin.
The opening reception for this show will begin at the rising of the Full Beaver Supermoon on November 15 at 3:56 pm. Be there!
On September 28, 2015, I set up my easel on a beach in Maine and painted/observed the full lunar eclipse take over the sky. I was awestruck as the sky transformed into deep blue-black, showcasing a red orange moon and limitless stars holding the Milky Way. A black horizontal strip of ocean was missing the moon’s reflection to delineate its presence. This celestial astronomical phenomenon inspired a six year series of painting each full moon, wherever I happened to be.
–Kristin Malin
I think a lot about how we interact with the natural world. More often than not, we have to make an effort to be in it- nature becomes a separate thing from our everyday life. When I make the trip, when I am in nature, I view it through a romantic lens- it is an ideal place of sublime power, beauty and peace, but I am always aware somehow that I am separate, a human in a technological cocoon. My work navigates the territory between these two places and the persistent desire for each.
–Chris Faust
My work investigates place and time. Remote wilderness and rural places that I return to each year to experience a closeness to nature and family. The paintings portray my experiences connecting to these places found in the forests of Northern Wisconsin (where I am from), the Boundary Waters Wilderness of Minnesota (where I go canoe camping each year), and in Maine (where I currently live). Disconnected from the habits of my everyday life, the paintings record my immersion, focus, and the transformation I experience in these isolated forests and authentic cabins. I make work both on-site and in my studio. My cottage book series focuses on summers spent at a family cottage in rural Northern Wisconsin. Built in the 1960s by my grandfather and his children, the space has largely stayed the same for the past 60 years. The cottage and the wilderness places I return to each year act as a way to mark time and a way to measure how my family and I change and grow.
–Breehan James
