works by 2023 award recipient Shaina Gates

and finalists Isabella Rotman + Dustan Knight 

October 17 - November 10 | Reception / Meet the Artists: Thursday, October 17 / 6 - 8PM

The New Hampshire Charitable Foundation’s Piscataqua Region Artist Advancement Grant provides financial support of up to $25,000 to a Seacoast-area visual artist or craftsperson to promote their artistic growth. The Artist Advancement Grant grew out of the Charitable Foundation’s long-term commitment to supporting the arts. The grant recognizes the importance of the artists who live and work in the region and help to make it such a vital community. The Artist Advancement Grant was developed to show respect for artists, create meaningful substantive support, help artists to advance their work and career and continue living in the area, and mutually benefit individual artists and the region as a whole. Artist Advancement Grant recipients are selected based on work that demonstrates an artistic vision and their plan for how they will use the grant to grow their artistic development.

In partnership with the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, 3S Artspace is delighted to mount works by the 2023 grant recipient and finalists:

• Grant recipient: Shaina Gates, experimental photographer (Kittery, ME)
  • Artist Bio: 
    

    Shaina Gates is an artist working in experimental photography, using black and white film to make colorful transparent images, using only light and limited chemistry. She currently lives and works in Kittery, ME. 

    Gates earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, an MAT in Art  Education from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 2008, and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005. Her work has been selected for several museum shows including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art’s 2023 Biennial, and the New England Triennial 2022, presented by the deCordova Museum and Fruitlands Museum,  as well as previous shows at the UNH Museum of Art and the Cape Cod Museum of  Art. Gates has produced nine solo exhibitions over the last 10 years, most recently including Specimina at the Experimental Photo Festival in Barcelona, Spain in 2024, and TESTSET at 3SArtspace in Portsmouth, NH in 2023. Selected group shows from  2024 include Air Index, at Equivalent Behavior Space in London, UK, Things We Lost In  The at Sidle House Gallery in Freeport, ME, Nor’Easterly at Katzman Contemporary  Projects in Dover, NH, Wild Light by Lights Out Gallery at Hewnoaks in Lovell, ME, and Shift/Plane/Density at Practice Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. In 2023, Gates was awarded the Piscataqua Region Artist Advancement Grant by the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation.

  • Artist Statement: 

    Over the last several years, I have continued to expand on a unique process that  causes black and white photographic film to produce a range of transparent color. In  order to do this, the film is exposed to the sun (or other intense light source) for an  extended period of time—ranging from minutes to days. The color develops during the  exposure itself, and varies depending on the film’s emulsion formula, the duration of  exposure, light quality, temperature… and many other environmental factors. The film  is then only fixed (not developed or tinted in any way), which stops the exposure,  preserves the color, and reveals the transparency. 

    This new body of work combines my ongoing interest in dimensional perception and  geometry, with more recent experiments in time-based processes. Using handmade  camera-like devices, I have been able to record and observe the way light moves and  folds its way through space.  

    In one camera-like arrangement, several layers of lenses and prisms are stacked at  different distances from a sheet of film laid flat at the base. Placed on the ground  outdoors, the sun bends and projects its light through these refractive layers, casting a  scattered image of itself onto the photosensitive material. By replacing the film at  regular intervals, the series of exposures is “animated” as the sun’s angle changes in  relation to the earth. In another example, I’ve combined a simple pinhole design with a  slit-scan technique—but rather than scanning the camera along a stationary subject,  the sun moves across the view of the stationary camera to produce the slit-scanned  image; each day appearing as a striated and voluminous arc. 

    Both organic in appearance and strictly geometric in theory, the spherical image of the  sun is twisted and stretched through a given set of conditions, while the light itself  assumes the most convenient shape and path to reach its observer: the surface of the  film. Through various presentation formats—including stop motion film animations,  complete sequences of the film itself, stereoscopic pairs extruded in time, multilayered  images merged into one, etc.—this body of work centers around the ways black and  white film is able to directly visualize the dimensionality and elasticity of light as color  and image.

• Finalist: Isabella Rotman, comic and zine creator (York, ME) 
  • Artist Bio:

    Isabella Rotman is a cartoonist and illustrator living and drawing in Maine. Her art is usually about the ocean, women, crushing loneliness, people in the woods, or sex. She proudly self-publishes both narrative and educational comics. Her published titles include A Quick and Easy Guide to Consent, Wait, What?: A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up, This Might Hurt Tarot, and Abortion Pill Zine. Isabella is a three-time NHAAG finalist, was nominated for the Promising New Talent Ignatz award in 2017, and her comic Like the Tide was nominated for Outstanding Online Comic in 2020. She is a founding organizer of Comic Arts Maine Portland.

• • Artist Statement: 

    I create comics as both an activist and an artist. My educational comics focus on issues in alignment with my values and identity to provide the reader with information, warm encouragement, and practical skills to support them in an increasingly confusing world. My narrative comics explore relatable emotions at the core of my personal experience to build surreal, visually rich narratives. I create comics to explore my inner self and shape my experiences into storytelling through which I can connect with others. Making comics allows me to investigate the essential parts of my being: connection to nature, cycles of loneliness, values of autonomy and equality, queer identity, and the pursuit of self-understanding.

    The final form of my comic work is most often a book or zine (zines are cheaply produced books which are not motivated by profit.) I have found the reach of both published and self-published books to have a wide and class-inclusive reach that is extremely powerful. I find a glorious freedom in self-publishing and affordable art. I put precious pieces of myself in little books, sell them for less than the cost of a fancy sandwich, and love it.

• Finalist: Dustan Knight, painter (New Castle, NH)
  • Artist Bio:

    Dustan Knight is a professional artist (MFA/Pratt Institute & MA/Boston University in Art History)(UCLA-Summer)(TA AcademyRome/Pratt) After a  long career of teaching in art colleges, Dustan retired to work full time in her studio at The Button Factory Portsmouth. Her extensive exhibition history, awards won and publications are easy to find on her web site DustanKnight.com  She is currently represented by Art 3 in Manchester, Chase Young Gallery in Boston and the Van Ward Gallery in Ogunquit Maine.

    Knight works in an intuitive, process style that pushes her materials and depends on her many years of visual study and creative experience to achieve her signature looseness and dramatic color exchanges. Lyrical movement and elegant composition are consistent elements of her artistic vocabulary.

  • Artist Statement: 

    The paintings included in this exhibition reveal a darker more dramatic aspect of Dustan's usual lyrical abstract oeuvre. The twisted combinations of architectural and interior imagery of  Fundort ( 1983)  emphasize the existential angst of the German Abstract Expressionists who were so influential for young artists in the NYC 80s. Forty years later Dustan picks up the thread in Mud ( 2022) with a rich palette of surfaces and layers of mixed materials evoking a natural landscape of mudflats at low tide.  Dustan continues to explore the chaotic juxtaposition of man-made and nature in the Storm Surge series which was inspired by the late winter flooding along the Seacoast. The angry sea breaching the constructed sea walls is poetically dystopian.
    Lightening this dark mood is a series of more lyrical, brightly colored abstract landscapes that carry on the artist's poetic interpretation of her locale.

Learn more about the AAG.

The grant is made possible by the Artist Advancement Initiative Fund, which was created at the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation by a Seacoast philanthropist, and expanded by the Foundation's Joan Dwyer and Jayne Dwyer Charitable Fund.