EXHIBITIONS
JOSEFINA AUSLENDER + TOM BUTLER, in conversation
September 23rd - December 15th, 2023 (EXTENDED)
Installation Image: Josefina Auslender + Tom Butler, in conversation. PHOTO CREDIT: Luc Demers
There is something about darkness, loss and the fallibility of memory that most prefer to avoid. As if through ignorance, we are safe. However, any Jungian analyst will tell you - we must embrace the dark to achieve balance. When we don’t, we risk being overcome.
The final exhibition of the 2023 season at Sarah Bouchard Gallery is a subtle and compelling exploration of some of the weightier aspects of human experience. The show positions the work of two very different artists in conversation around concepts of absence and loss. Both push boundaries between terror and triumph, finding beauty and poise in the effort to grapple with it all.
EXHIBITION IMAGES
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Conversations happen all the time. We converse with one another to share everything from trivial logistics to deep desires.
Josefina Auslender + Tom Butler, in conversation takes place across time, distance and culture through the works of two very different artists. In distinct ways, each artist has turned to the act of making to recover from a profound absence. To be very clear – while these works are presented in conversation with one another, neither artist created work with an awareness of the other in mind. The exhibition pairs their work to encourage intimate thinking about the human condition and what it feels like to experience loss.
For over 70 years, Josefina Auslender’s primary practice has been drawing. Her work is inarguably that of a Master. She understands graphite in ways most of us will never come close to comprehending. Her ink works are a continuation of concepts and expressions she has been grappling with her entire life. Auslender is originally from Buenos Aires. She left after surviving Argentina’s Dirty War to find solace and home here in Maine. Since then, she has been quietly making work and learning to lean into the concept of freedom. She is 89 years old.
Tom Butler demonstrates an uncanny acuity and skill in pushing the medium of photography outside its own bounds. His consistent experimentations with the photographic image call into question nearly everything the medium was created to achieve. He is invested in the role of memory and forgetting to such a degree that his body of work can read like a doctoral dissertation on the subject. He is a relatively younger artist – in his forties - originally from London, now splitting time between London and Maine. To position his work in conversation with Josefina Auslender is to make evident (for anyone still unaware) that Tom is on his way to his own form of Mastery. His work is subtle and profound.
It is an honor to bring together the works of these two phenomenal artists and human beings.
We have an extensive back room for this exhibition, in that there are many works from the conversation that have not made it onto the walls. Please request access when you visit if you’d like to see more. The show will be up through October 29th, with a strong chance we will extend it into November.
Sarah Bouchard, 2023
ARTIST STATEMENT: JOSEFINA AUSLENDER
Los Caprichos + Los Caprichos 2023
It’s very easy. Los Caprichos came after a very difficult time in Argentina – the Dirty War. I was working with the series Los Cuerpos and when that finished, suddenly Los Caprichos began to appear. I decided to call the series Los Caprichos because ‘Caprichos’ are like happenings. They can happen in music, or in the visual arts – maybe literature. The series saved me, in a way – helping me come out of the series Los Cuerpos. It was a very unhappy time, and I was unhappy in my studio.
Los Caprichos came and while they were not easy works, they gave me lots of pleasure. They made me forget, in a way - not the past - but a way of being, so that I could come into another situation with myself and my art.
More recently, in 2022, I was struggling just to go into my studio. I wasn’t working. It wasn’t COVID – I always thought COVID could give me the opportunity to work more in my studio because I had to be in my house, but that didn’t happen. This was completely related to my husband, Aby, being ill and dying. All that time I was coming into my studio, and I couldn’t work.
When I decided to work with ink, something happened to me. It was very similar to what happened after Los Cuerpos. Back then, I needed to make peace with myself, with my story, the story of my country, with my studio … with everything. A similar thing happened to me when I began to make the ink drawings.
It isn’t that they made me forget Aby. I will never forget Aby. It was like being inside myself and my body, close to my soul, and being happy because suddenly I had something to say with my work. That’s why I call them Los Caprichos 2023 because it is the same feeling in a completely different time and context.
It felt the same for me as when I came out from that terrible Dirty War. The ink drawings happened three or four years after Aby died, and they felt like finding myself again. When Aby died, in some ways a part of me went away forever, but in other ways that didn’t happen. I recovered a part of myself, and I began to work.
These works make me feel that it is time for me to begin to think more about the fact that I am still alive and can do things. In a way, this work belongs to a very sad time, but at the same time it makes me very happy and gives me lots of pleasure because it allowed me to come out … it’s like living in a cave and suddenly finding a light on the horizon and walking toward the light and coming out into the world again. And that’s it. Very easy.
Josefina Auslender, 2023
ARTIST STATEMENT: TOM BUTLER
Memory Sludge & Ruins
Memory Sludge, 2022-2023 continues Butler’s urge to creatively devolve photography, here attempting to turn modern photographs 'back into memories’. Standard 4 x 6-inch c-type prints from Butler’s own past have had their colourful pigment removed, re-constituted into a sludgy paste, and then reapplied to the original photographic paper. Butler’s ambition is to bring recent colour photographs closer to the experience of forgetting.
Three larger artworks are also presented in this series. Each 24” x 24” panel contains 24 photographs, equivalent to one roll of film, to create a collective slurry of people no longer known, places no longer visited and discarded artworks extant only in documentation. Butler likens the dark blobs to unruly animals in a circus big top, hence the curved horizon line. In this way he attempts to wrangle the photographs back into a primitive form, drawing them away from their modern, artificially fixed nature.
Also presented are Ruins, 2023, two 38’ x 50” graphite drawings of broken and distorted rooms. Much like his photo-based work, Butler’s room drawings are inspired by absence, but in this case, they are liberated from photographic source material. Much like memories, these Gothic greyscale drawings appear distorted and fractured by time, prone to leaks and given to ultimate fading.
Tom Butler, 2023
PRESS
Art Review: Two artists process trauma in works up in Woolwich
By Jorge Arango
October 29th, 2023
Portland Press Herald
JOSEFINA AUSLENDER, A SOLO EXHIBITION
July 2nd - August 7th, 2022
On Saturday, July 2nd, 2022, Sarah Bouchard Gallery opened a solo exhibition for Josefina Auslender, one of the most brilliant artists working in Maine, today. The fact that Josefina Auslender is not a household name to anyone in the arts is baffling.
Auslender is a master of her craft – a draftswoman with over sixty years of experience. She is a brilliant technician with a unique mind, a quick wit and a staggering work ethic. She is an icon of Latin American art. Originally from Buenos Aires, Auslender moved to the United States in the early 90s. She left Argentina at the height of her career, leading a much quieter life in Maine, but she did not stop working.
It was a rare privilege to present Auslender’s solo exhibition at Sarah Bouchard Gallery, featuring two distinct bodies of work – one created in Buenos Aires at the time of the Dirty War, and one created here in Maine, this year. Most of this work has not been seen in the United States.
The series from Argentina is titled Los Cuerpos (the bodies). It is a collection of abstract portraits of women looking out windows, waiting for their children and loved ones to return home. During the time of the Dirty War, people were often taken from the streets, never to be seen again. Auslender was one of the many women who waited up at night, staring out the window. This series took her over and commandeered her practice until the Dirty War ended.
The second series is titled Wind, an abstract group of ink drawings created this year. These are the first drawings Auslender completed since the passing of her husband, several years ago. They are quietly powerful explorations of circles and line.
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La Ciudad (03)
La Ciudad (01)
La Ciudad (02)
Los Cuerpos (01)
Self-portrait
Los Cuerpos (03)
Los Cuerpos (02)
Los Cuerpos (04)
Los Cuerpos (05)
Wind (03)
Wind (014)
Wind (06)
Wind (01)
Wind (07)
Wind (04)
Wind (11)
Wind (08)
ARTIST STATEMENT
I never do statements because I don’t believe that a piece related to visual art should be explained with words. It must go through other channels inside the human being. What is for the eyes is for the eyes, what is for the ears is for the ears, what is for the mouth is for the mouth.
This is a different circumstance because the work I am showing now was an interruption in my life that lasted for three years and then disappeared. I was working with the series La Ciudad (the City), and suddenly these figures began to come out. I couldn’t erase them.
I wanted to stop them because they weren’t related to what I was doing, but I couldn’t. I talked with my mentor, and he told me, “Just let them come out. You don’t know how long they will last or if they will be interesting. Don’t force yourself not to do something that is coming out so strongly.”
I began to work, and the figures took me completely over like a storm. I worked non-stop. I made lots of small drawings, and then some became larger pieces. Some sold in Buenos Aires and some I am showing now.
At the beginning, I didn’t know why the figures were coming. Later, I learned. It’s strange. It’s a bit surrealistic because it’s something that I really didn’t have too much control over. They were coming and they were showing me something that was going on.
This happened during the time when the militares took over the government in Argentina. Many people were disappearing. We didn’t know where they were going. We didn’t know there were places in the city where they were torturing people. When the militares decided to leave, the trials began. I learned that these drawings began when Argentinians began to be tortured and they finished when the militares were gone.
I am not a hero, and I don’t want people to think that I am a hero or a victim of anything. I was a citizen like everybody else in Argentina, and we didn’t know everything that was going on in the country. I had a feeling that came through me that made me create what I did. This is it.
I detest violence. I am a pacifist. I don’t believe in wars. I don’t believe wars will cure or bring anything nice to a country. On the contrary, it will destroy many wonderful things that a country has, and that people have.
One piece I consider a self-portrait. Almost all the pieces are women. These works show what we felt about our men, our sons and daughters and husbands and ourselves … going out and never knowing if we were going to come back.
My ink drawings are different. I am playing, now.
JOSEFINA AUSLENDER | June 2022
PRESS
Josefina Auslender’s Portraits of Argentina’s Dirty War
By Carl Little
July 28, 2022
Hyperallergic