n e w s

Curtis's work was featured on a Maine Public Broadcasting Network program titled "Maine Art Scene," on Maine Watch with Jennifer Rooks February 8.

Excerpts from Amy Calder's August 28, 2006 preview of SOUND--"Art on a grand scale: Chaos, order, repetition in exhibit reflect repetitive tasks in mill work." Copyright © 2006 Morning Sentinel
In the old mills of Maine, workers' movements were repetitive--cutting, stitching, re-threading machines, folding garments, one on top of the other. That repetition was echoed in the buildings themselves--in walls made of brick on brick, rows of workstations, of lights and windows. But in that order was also, naturally, chaos.

The more Amy Stacey Curtis spends long hours developing her art in these old, defunct mills, the more she finds a growing connection between her work and that of the laborers from long ago.

"In the Lewiston mill, especially, I probably felt the workers' energy most of all, especially late at night," she says.

Curtis is the Maine Arts Commission's 2005 Individual Artist Fellow for Visual Art, working on a temporary exhibit on the second floor of the old Lockwood Mill on Water Street, currently owned by Central Maine Power Co. She is engaging in an ambitious, multi-year project in which she installs a large-scale art exhibit every two years in a vacant Maine mill for a show that runs about a month. Her installations explore the concepts of chaos, order and repetition through specific themes--and require audience participation. Without that participation, her work is incomplete, according to Curtis.

Curtis' multi-year project started in 2000 with her show, RETROSPECTIVE, at the Bates Mill in Lewiston. She continued with MOVEMENT at the Old Sebago Shoe Mill in Westbrook in 2002; and CHANGE at Fort Andross in Brunswick in 2004...her work reflects the idea that the balance of repetition, chaos and order reflects everything, everyone, every event, and that we and everything are connected.

Curtis spends 22 months developing each exhibit--from doing work in her studio to raising funds, enlisting assistants, installing equipment, showing and documenting each show before tearing it down.

Curtis, 36, of Gray, is an installation artist whose work represents hundreds of hours of intense labor. She goes into the dirty, dusty mills and physically scrubs the massive spaces to accommodate her work. She enlists family members, fellow artists and friends to help scrape paint, build, assemble and install exhibits that often include a couple thousand cans, dozens of large pipes, balls or other objects. In the mill last week, Curtis guided an energetic tour down hallways, into rooms and across an expansive second floor, introducing volunteers who pounded nails, painted walls and hauled heavy loads of lumber.

She has worked eight hours a day, seven days a week in the space since August 4 and will continue until her show opens October 7, commuting the hour-plus drive from Gray or staying with friends in Winslow when she is too exhausted at the end of the day to see straight.

"Her installations are just amazing feats of engineering," says June Fitzpatrick, owner of June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland, where Curtis' work has been exhibited several years. "I'm struggling for words here. It's more than many artists can even contemplate."

Donna McNeil, contemporary art and public art director for the Maine Arts Commission, said Curtis was chosen from among 100 artists to receive the Commission's $13,000 fellowship for visual art by a juried panel of artists in other states. "The thing about Amy's work that people are really bowled over by is her long-range planning and how a young woman has really planned out her life for the next 20 years--how she had the moxie to not wait for the typical exhibitions. People are attracted to her because she's a success story and she's a young person and has re-invented moving around the gallery system."

Those familiar with her work say Curtis is headed for greatness. "I think Amy's a world-class artist," McNeil says. "She's unstoppable and we're just proud and pleased she's in Maine. She's top-notch."

Stan Colburn assists Curtis at her shows. He met her in 1986 when she entered his art class at Massabesic High School in Waterboro, where he taught 10 years before going to Portland High. Her primary interest at Massabesic was mathematics, at which she excelled--and which she continues to use in her art. Colburn immediately saw great talent in Curtis' drawings, sculpture and painting, he said. He also sensed an extraordinary sensitivity for someone so young. He sent her to Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle where, she says, her passion turned from mathematics to art.

May, 2006
WOMEN, TRAUMA & VISUAL EXPRESSION, was named a 2006 Independent Publisher Book Awards Finalist (Psychology/Mental Health). The Independent Publisher Book Awards brings national recognition to titles published by independent authors, self-publishers, universities, and small presses.

99 SOUNDS review by Alex Rheault, November, 2005
Amy Stacey Curtis's new exhibit "99 Sounds" combines a series of graphite and charcoal marks on white paper and sounds recorded onto white labeled chrome CDs, reflecting the greys and gaps of humanity. Curtis generously risks, takes chances with meaning, and through personal expression, deeply connects with each one of us individually and collectively.

Curtis surpasses Allan Kaprow's prediction, that "Pollock left us at the point where we must become dazzled and even preoccupied with the space and objects of our everyday life," and invites us all to participate in the significance of our bedazzlement, wonder and preoccupation with our existence, encouraging us to re/experience its simultaneous mundanity and wonder.

Curtis suspends intuitive interpretations of sound delicately contained in ethereal graphite outlined squares, either one and quarter, three or six inches, on ten-inch-square-cut Arches paper, with tiny black and chrome office clips, which move around three of the sun-kissed white walls like a unifying belt. Hung in rows of three, the belt's width and pattern are broken, when the drawings are rows of two. The drawings are often horizontal lines, rubbings in gradation, pattings of pencil, smudgings of charcoal. The presence and absence of light and dark, variations in values of grey, shaped markings, impossible spots, spontaneous blotches, nervous scratches, fine lines, visual hiccups and geometric patternings, variability and mutability, widen our eyes' blindspots, while sounds whisper, echo, reverberate, shock, tickle and tug at our ears.

Columns of circular CDs hang on invisible small nails just below the drawings. Each CD has a word in Curtis' handwriting in black ink on the white label representing the sound such as an object, place, or action; "refrigerator," "purring," "Depot Road" (there are also nine CDs representing music which Curtis has been inspired by) deftly discontinue the square and substitute a circle, subtly shifting the grid's linear and angular regularity. The CDs also include a number, which correspond to the sound. As you handle the CD, its inner chrome surface mirrors one's own face, as it is placed into the matte chrome player.

Numbers are significant; Curtis uses her love of and interest in mathematics in all of her works. Nine, a prime number, is protected from any disconnection from itself, reduction, or erasure. Nine is total and complete, an entity full of grace, confidence, a number, which can multiply and retain its identity as nine. Numbers' steadfastness and precariousness, potential and failure, use and misuse co-exist and co-mingle in Curtis's thesis and use of numbers. We can mix numbers up, misrepresent and miscalculate them. Numbers are supportive of truths. Numbers become a metaphoric ground for extremes, simultaneity, chance, randomness, order, chaos, and the incalculable tendencies of humanity and nature to come into contact.

Curtis takes risks with both numbers and marks. Accidents contribute to potential, variety, growth. The CDs of sounds could be moved and misplaced, making it possible to listen to sounds that correspond with other drawings, if the CDs were put back differently than they were found. Domestic order is relaxed; we will not be reprimanded for mixing things up, perhaps even rewarded for making discoveries.

Curtis makes room for accidents, questions, and the impossible in the risks she permits to the order she has developed and chosen. She makes allowances for displacement to happen, rendering misunderstanding acceptable, part of the experience of relationship beyond the work. This is a remarkable act of faith in both her process and the participants, which connects Curtis, the work and the participants infinitely. The participant does not feel judged or afraid to make a mistake, since there is no evidence of a mistake to be made despite a distinct arrangement and order of things. Without a list of rules, there is permission to experience, to experiment, to fail, to discover, to learn.

CD players are available on a small table with headsets for listener-viewer-participants to use. The seductive list of sounds has the feel of a personal shopping list one finds on a sidewalk, and I found myself begging for a copy. One can cruise the room, moving from drawing and sound to drawing and sound, listening and looking, enveloped in the world Curtis has collected, stacked, and arranged. Curtis takes the chance that there is no order, or that her order may not be the participant's order. A participant may choose to look first, then listen later. Or listen only, and look later. I was listening, then distracted by the conversations or shifts in audible din, and looked away from the work. I found myself wrapped in the sound, imaging the blender grinding away, or the engine running, and where it was.

Curtis creates a graphite world in simple black and white and encourages all the shades of grey; a world of Curtis's memories and imaginings, her sensitivity and her creation of order out of chaos, being out of longing, so we can glimpse it with her. A world familiar, and unfamiliar. We bring to her work, memories, imaginings, sensitivity, order, and being, our own memories and imaginings, our own sensitivity and creation of order out of chaos, being out of longing. We as participant can and are encouraged to add to and subtract from to the work, even continue the work.

One of Curtis' premises is that the viewer is not merely a set of eyes or ears or a warm body in the room. Not a witness, rather, the participant is active in creating the work and informing the dialogue Curtis initiates. It is Curtis's assertion, that without the participant the work is incomplete, that with the participant, the work is completed. I would add, completed over and over again. Everyone makes their mark, indelibly, invisibly. Curtis' works are often accompanied by instructions. Perhaps, Curtis's confidence in her connection with others is growing and the intimacy of the space is the proportionately secure setting for the exclusion of guidelines, and play is gradually becoming the more visible, audible, tangible essence of humanity Curtis is aiming at through her explorations of the sensory, of the intellectual, the emotional and the relational in her works large and small.

Another experience of the work is that we become simultaneous eavesdropping-voyeurs/supportive listening-seers, engaging with Curtis's explorations. We borrow them temporarily, then reform them as our own by commingling our experience of the sounds in the past and present, and interpreting them anew, and taking away an intangible, invisible, inaudible memory of sensation and connectedness.

Curtis pairs contingency and indeterminancy, which allow for operations of chance and systems, order and chaos, repetition and unknowns to co-exist, overlap and interchange. Curtis brings experience to the forefront of the work, and she challenges the conventions of art, its uses and meaning. The questioning in Curtis's works leads to more questioning. Curtis holds out underlying precariousness and chaos of surety, the insecurity of security, while embracing the beauty of order and the blow of chaos simultaneously.

Curtis initiates a dialogue between sound and drawings, hearing and sight. Curtis emphasizes imaginings and experience, her imaginings and experience, which are channeled and redirected by the listener-viewer-participant. The drawings are not illustrations of sound nor stand to privilege the eye, but act as continuously discontinuous experiences, vibrating, echoing, re-sounding.

Curtis's drawings are intentionally priced as low as fifty dollars, and the proceeds will contribute to her upcoming biennial in October of 2006. This way a wider audience can purchase her work and additionally support her upcoming works. Curtis generously invites participants to become collaborators by making her work available in a myriad of ways during and beyond this exhibit. One does not feel beholden, but rather, honored, invited, welcome.

Read Michael Townsend's The Bollard interview "99 pictures of sound on the wall," November 9, 2005. This interview includes an interesting waveform experiment.

Excerpts from Bob Keyes' October 17, 2004 Audience review of CHANGE--"You're invited to help artist create." Copyright © 2004 Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram
If she weren't an artist, Amy Stacey Curtis might have been a mathematician.

A visible example of her interests and inclinations is Curtis' new art installation at Fort Andross in Brunswick, which used to house a textiles factory. The 34-year-old artist from Gray has assembled nine distinct pieces, many of them kinetic, that require action on the part of the viewer.

[One piece:] Curtis assembled a film loop from 366 photos--one for each day of the year, including an extra day for Leap Year--that she shot near her home on Mayall Road in Gray. In the video collage, we see the trees bud, leaf, shed and then go bare, all in a minute's time. It's all about sequence, pattern, predictability and change.

Curtis has titled her exhibition CHANGE, and her goal is to engage people in her creative process. By executing tasks that she assigns to each of her pieces, participants help Curtis complete her artistic vision. Her theory is that for all the order in the world, chaos exists to balance it. In that context, this installation is as much an experiment in human behavior as it is an exhibition of art. Part of the purpose of her project is to witness the chaos that we, as participants, introduce into each of her pieces. The exhibition is a study and provocation of change, designed to make people pause and think about their place in the world and how their small and seemingly innocuous actions affect society on a grander scale.

"To me, chaos, order and repetition are the equation of everything, including us and everything around us," she says. "It's a raw language that represents everything around us and everything we do."

CHANGE is the third installment in a series of six "solo-biennial" exhibitions that Curtis began in 2000. They will continue through 2010.

The empty mill setting is key to the outcome of her exhibition, although Curtis discovered that by accident after she already had committed to the mill in Lewiston for her first installation four years ago. During the exhausting installation process late at night, Curtis sensed the mill's leftover energy. Work had ceased in the mill years before Curtis arrived on site, but the mill still felt active, alive. In that moment, she realized how appropriate the setting was for her work. In these old mills, generations of workers had been trained--indeed, programmed--to execute in a robotic-like manner the same procedures over and over again, with a specific outcome in mind. And yet, by their very nature, humans cannot execute exact tasks with precision time and again. Their work must allow for unavoidable variances that are part of human nature.

The same is true of Curtis and her art installations.

She may design her pieces with the precision of an engineer, with a specific outcome in mind as the likely result. But the person participating in the installation can't help but introduce an element that is beyond control of the artist.

That moment of uncontrolled chaos is the grist of Curtis' work.

That chaos may also relate to emotional change.

[Another piece:] Curtis has set up nine pedestals and asked each participant to leave a personal possession behind on top the pedestal. In exchange, they remove an item to take with them. The items left behind vary, though many seem easily discardable--lip balm, an ID tag, a baseball cap. Others seem significant. One person left behind a wedding band. Another left a set of keys.

"In that small act of leaving something behind, people share a lot with me," says Curtis. "People are putting things down and leaving things behind that are representative of very personal stuff they want to let go of."

In 2010, when she completes her opus, she will have learned much about herself, human nature and the balance of chaos, order and repetition. She plans to write a book or catalog about the experience.

June Fitzpatrick, a Portland gallery owner who represents Curtis, said the artist is unusual in her desire for community participation in her work.

"She just has such a strong belief in what she is doing. All artists do, but she has a way that many artists don't," Fitzpatrick said. "Many artists retreat into themselves. But she draws everybody into her work."

Last week, Curtis received the highest honor accorded to a visual artist by the Maine Arts Commission. She was awarded the Individual Artist Fellowship, a $13,000 state grant that rewards artistic excellence and is designed to advance and promote individual artists.

"A jury of three out-of-state curators selected Curtis for the prize based in part on her inclusion of the audience as part of her artistic process," said Donna McNeil, a contemporary arts associate with the Maine Arts Commission. Her selection affirms the vitality of contemporary art in Maine, a place that sometimes is viewed as a haven for traditional two-dimensional art.

"Maine has a long tradition in the arts. To maintain a long tradition in the arts, you have to maintain an avant-garde or you fall off the map. We haven't fallen off the map. Artists of high caliber are drawn here because we get it, and the selection of Amy Stacey Curtis proves it," McNeil said.

Excerpts from Chris Thompson's October 17, 2002 review of MOVEMENT--"Your own risk." Copyright © 2002 The Portland Phoenix
Recently, sculptor Richard Serra noted that, although we tend to think of formal abstraction as a historical phenomenon that has had its day, its formal languages are really less than two centuries old. That's but a drop in the bucket of art history, and, he suggested, there are entire worlds of formal exploration and analysis that have yet to be imagined.

In her temporary exhibition MOVEMENT, local artist Amy Stacey Curtis takes up Serra's challenge--drawing it together with the challenge issued nearly 100 years ago by Marcel Duchamp, with his insistence that it is the viewer rather than the artist who makes the work of art--in staging a series of aesthetic encounters that couple formalism's experiential pleasures and provocations, both raw and refined, with a carefully crafted conceptual framework that remains open to being revised and unsettled by the combination of chaotic and ordered interactions of the show's viewer/participants. As one of several identical signs hung at head level at movement's entrance tell us: "Without your perception/participation/perpetuation my work is unfinished--aesthetically/conceptually/collectively".

The second in a series of what she calls "solo-biennial" exhibits, MOVEMENT is an installation comprised of nine different but interrelated stations, each of which "explores the aesthetic and collective balance of chaos, order, and repetition through a unique focus." Their titles (volition, torsion, pendulum, abacus II, labyrinth II, channel I, undulation, flux, and, finally, forward) refer to the specific kind of movement that each piece makes possible.

The first, volition, a massive red oak table filled with a grid of hundreds of drilled holes, invites participants to remove the nine small metal rods left in their holes by the previous user and then reinsert them, "choosing as randomly as possible."

Apart from its metaphorical impact--which kicks off our tour by stirring us to consciousness of the movement of our own will, that animating force that makes possible our interaction with all others--volition opens a subtle psychological conundrum as well. As I completed the task, I wondered: was that really random, or just impulsive? How do you choose randomly? How do you separate volitional from randomness, will from obedience--particularly when you note that these questions are raised as a result of your having chosen to follow a set of carefully crafted instructions?

Throughout the show we are slowed to reflect upon the way the tiniest action opens to a universe of implications. Indeed, because the instructions for torsion, the next station, ask that participants wait for the piece to stop moving before using it again, I had to wait a good 10 minutes before I could step up, with two other visitors, to one of the three large metal discs, each suspended from the ceiling by a dozen or so galvanized cables.

Whoever had operated the third disc just before us had clearly twisted it too much. It continued to spin long after the others stopped. Consequently we continued to wait. And as we did, I looked back and noticed the line of people waiting to do precisely the same-but-different thing, standing there and talking, reassuring their kids that they'd get to the rest of the pieces soon.

Across the expansive space--its long clean symmetrical expanse, evenly channeled by columns, looking like an early Renaissance perspectival drawing--parents at station eight (flux) giggled as they popped little black marbles into a long curving suspended metal pipe, while their kids took turns at undulation (station seven). As the metallic echoes of their parents' marbles created a makeshift soundtrack for the entire room, the kids kept deadly serious as they tried to walk as even a pace as possible past a wall of metal washers hung at uniform length at the end of fishing line. Reaching the end, they turned gleefully to watch the hanging wall register their passing with its rhythmic buckles and bends.

As Curtis notes, MOVEMENT's aim is to make possible an "opportunity for dialogue--not only about the philosophies of this non-traditional art genre and visual working examples of physical and mathematical concepts, but about how the audience's precise, periodical perpetuation of its installations suggests order and chaos inherent in ourselves, our community and our collective environment."

Both the scale of her aspirations and the success of her efforts situate "movement" within a history of innovative alternative spaces--from the Fluxus folks, who first colonized defunct Soho industrial lofts as artists' live/work spaces in the 1960s, to the more recent emergence of upper-end warehouse-galleries like New York's Dia Center for the Arts and the Geffen Contemporary (once the "Temporary Contemporary") in Los Angeles.

We tend to romanticize their "do-it-yourself" ethic, but the logistical and financial obstacles that have to be overcome in order to mount such shows are daunting. They require that Edisonian mix of 99 parts perspiration and one part inspiration, and, in this case, a team of volunteers, two of them engineers, a host of funders, and the willingness to admit that there is no "I" in "team." All of which makes it a glorious thing to watch a project like this one take shape and then, as its users get rapturously lost somewhere between the simplicity of their actions and the dynamism of their experience, to see it take flight.

Excerpts from Chris Thompson's May 2, 2002 preview of Ere Movement--"The art of raw." Copyright © 2002 The Portland Phoenix
The 6th-century BC Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu's famous treatise on conducting warfare, known in English as The Art of War, is generally seen to be without equal as a resource for strategists and tacticians in any discipline. The Second World War's generals Rommel and Patton were both dedicated adherents of Sun Tzu's teachings. Today the book is read and quoted by Fortune 500 executives and hip-hop artists alike (not to say that the two are necessarily mutually exclusive).

As though predicting the birth of abstract painting, Sun Tzu wrote that although there are only five basic colors, they produce more variations than can ever be seen. He employed this analogy to make his point that, similarly, though in warfare there are only a fairly limited range of direct and indirect tactics, they can be combined and manipulated to give rise to endless possibilities for overcoming one's opponent.

"The shih of battle do not exceed the extraordinary and the orthodox," he wrote. "Yet all their variations cannot be exhausted." The term shih, a word without English equivalent, refers to the power that is inherent in any given situation, a power that is constantly changing, keeping the general ever on her toes so that when these shifting forces reach their most dynamic state, she will be ready and able to direct them efficiently in support of her agenda.

In conjunction with this week's First Friday festivities, local artist and inspired strategist Amy Stacey Curtis (currently included in the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA's Terrain exhibition) will stage Ere Movement--a hybrid event that will appear for an eye-twinkling 48 hours at Portland Stage Company's Performing Arts Center. Part exhibition of her recent paintings and part party, one that will dovetail with the concluding weekend of the play Art, Curtis describes Ere Movement as a "casual fundraising exhibit" intended to generate resources and support for her larger project entitled Movement.

The series of paintings that Curtis will display are the products of a working process in which she records the dialogue between the repetitive movements undertaken by her body, and their mirroring in the dynamic compositions that emerge through these measured actions. The concern with the phenomenology of the body's experience of space, its sensitivities to the ever-changing relationship between moment and movement, passive and active experience, extends also into her installation work. Indeed, she explains that the paintings in Ere Movement are "sketches toward or precursors of her installations."

For over a year now, Curtis has been working towards the realization of Movement, an interactive installation that is currently scheduled to take place this October 12 though 26 at a yet-undetermined site [near] Portland. Still a progress-in-work, this fall project is conceived as a series of "nine audience-perpetuated installations," each of which focuses upon a specific mode of motion: "pendulous, rotational, forward, perceived, random, flowing, twisting, undulating," and, perhaps most intriguing of all, "volitional"--evoking the notion that the movement of the will might link the inner and outer landscapes, a notion that seems itself to be a strange hybrid of Sun Tzu's shih and 19th-century German philosophy.

Curtis writes that each of her installations is an attempt to move "toward an aesthetic and collective balance of chaos, order, and repetition while inviting the audience to participate in and perpetuate the work." In order to find this equilibrium, she says, it is necessary for "the audience to become a component of each piece; the audience is invited to interact--to maintain, manipulate and move. Each installation, ostensibly simple, communicates this balance to myself and to the participating audience, a raw language which I feel resonates physically, emotionally, and spiritually within everyone."

Today, discussions of contemporary artistic practice tend to focus upon the term "process": the experience of making work, inhabiting the present moment of its creation, attending to the inherent qualities of the media and the way they do or do not respond, the internal dialogue that happens between oneself and one's work.

Yet in critical debates as well as in art instruction, almost never is "process" discussed in language that dares to broach the subject of spirituality. If ever that word rears its head, we all usually feel free to enjoy a clinical wink and smirk at the naif's expense, as things get rerouted back to the safety of the secular. Curtis' willingness to engage with this word, as well as what it refers to, permits her work to pose some compellingly agnostic ways of exploring the "raw language" that binds us, materially and spiritually, in our experience of the uniqueness of the each moment and its movement.

From her paintings and installations to her MUSE project, which seeks to create and foster a proliferating network of discussions between any creative individuals who happen to be interested in taking part, Curtis' work develops a dialogue that is experimental in the most rigorously open-minded sense of the term. It methodically investigates the coming together of body, mind, soul, self, and other, so that, as Sun Tzu would have us remember, though "the fight is chaotic, yet one is not subject to chaos."

paintings/drawings 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 books amy@amystaceycurtis.com home