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
Don’t Show This to Anybody
August 13th - September 18th, 2022
Don’t Show This to Anybody brings together five bodies of work by British-born artist Tom Butler, all investigating the complexities of the photographic image. The works on view deny us visual information (the primary function of photography) in order to explore the sculptural qualities of the medium. Butler emphasizes how these found images have been treated over time and how photographs may alter or inhibit the natural process of forgetting.
This is an epic exhibition that includes large-scale photography, bronze casting, graphite drawings, sculpture and minimalist painting. Working through and across media, Butler invites the viewer to expand the notion of how a photograph both reveals and conceals its own identity, not to mention that of the subject and viewer. Each work within the show has been crafted with the utmost attention to detail, demonstrating true mastery.
Butler received his MFA in sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2007. He has had solo exhibitions all over the world including, most notably, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France and the United States. Butler has served as a visiting artist and critic at Bowdoin College, Maine College of Art and Design and Maine Media Workshops and College. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the British Museum, Soho House, The Caldic Collection, the Bates Museum of Art and the Ogunquit Museum of Art. Butler splits his time between Portland, Maine and London, UK.
Installation Image
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Bright Corners, 01
The City, c.1930
Truth, c.1930
Ladies on a bridge, c.1930
Bat Dog, c.1940
Two and a Half Dogs, c. 1930
Cigar Man, c.1945
Twins with Ringlets, c.1890
Bearded Man, c.1890
Reading the funnies, c.1950
Pencils of Nature (01 - 09)
She's Looking Right At You, c.1900
Frederic
Locket
Richardson
Columbus
Locket, c.1890
Downward Glance, c.1870
Barstow
Pencil of Nature (10)
Anderson
Pencils of Nature
Snow
Lenz
Madison
Isaacs
Wis
Speck
Monroe
Claire
Dickie
Platt
Sandusky
Lane
Bonell
Brandt
Sandy
"O"
Man and Woman Standing by a Lake, c.1970
Tiny Bird on a Beach, c.1970
now don't show this to any body, c.1910
ARTIST STATEMENT
Don’t Show This to Anybody
I have a photo-postcard of a lady in a fancy hat, c. 1910. The image has been colorised. The combination of outfit, photograph and tint meant it would have been quite an expensive thing to have made. “Please don’t die when you look at this” she writes to ‘Mitt’ as she describes herself and new clothes in detail, “…now don’t show this to any body [sic] or I won’t send you anymore.”
Don’t Show This to Anybody brings together five bodies of work by British-born artist Tom Butler, all investigating the complexities of the photographic image. The works on view deny us visual information (the primary function of photography) to explore the sculptural qualities of the medium. Butler emphasizes how found images have been treated over time and how photographs can inhibit our natural ability to forget.
Bright Corners 01, 2019, is part of an ongoing series of self-portraits concerned with the relationship between hiding and performing. Here, the artist attempts to empty his body and replace it with one of the most private spaces of his house.
Pencils of Nature, 2019-2022, is a collection of over 100 individual sculptures made from Victorian cabinet cards and vintage studio photographs. In a conceptual riff on Fox Talbot’s 1844 text, where Talbot asserted that the photograph would one day replace the pencil, Butler’s, ‘Pencils’, are a creative attempt to devolve early photographs back into pencils, styluses, and hand-tools, for purposes unknown.
Ghostcards, 2021-2022, are panel mounted cabinet cards painted over with layers of gesso. The gesso is sanded, repainted, and waxed until the figure sits at the brink of visibility, like a fading memory.
Photorubbings, 2021-2022, highlight Butler’s fascination with photographs as objects. A photograph can display its own unintended histories and narratives - whether it was kept in an album, folded in a wallet, protected in an archival sleeve, or scratched and torn to pieces.
Bronzetypes, 2022 are bronze casts of Victorian cabinet cards made by the burnout method which incinerates the original. Like the rubbings, the bronzes capture the original in every way except the pictorial. These celebrate the form, dents and embossing to draw our attention away from the sitter to a wider sense of absence and the human need to preserve by creating photographic objects.
Tom Butler, 2022
PRESS
Tom Butler’s Cabinet of Wonders
By Mark Wethli
November 11th, 2022
Two Coats of Paint
Art Review: Galleries show the spectrum of Maine’s contemporary art scene
By Jorge S. Arango
September 11th, 2022
Maine Sunday Telegram
Don’t Show This to Anybody: A photographer who hates photography featured at Woolwich gallery
By Maria Skillings
August 11, 2022
The Times Record