2018 Students
Student’s entering the program every year provide an artist statement and short biography.
Bill Drake
Winterport, Maine based photographer, William Drake, acquired a BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 1980. He then entered the commercial photography profession in New York City and served clients of the corporate industry for 20 years before moving to Maine and becoming the campus photographer at University of Maine from 2004-2009. William Drake taught photography at Husson University and has been a freelance photographer in the Bangor area for many years.
His fine art photography was selected by renowned curator Mark Rosenthal for a show at Beaver college in 1996 where he displayed his photographs of HO scaled figures taken through a micro lens. This work was Inspired by concepts which challenge stereotypes and give insight into the dynamics of identity and relationships. In all of his work he endeavors to represent the essential qualities of the subject matter using the technology available at the moment the image is captured.
Thomas Griffith
Thomas Griffith graduated with an AAS degree in advertising and commercial art in 1991. Since that time he has worked for multiple businesses as a graphic artist for over ten years as well as worked in a freelance capacity.
As a graphic artist, he started working on traditional hand graphics design methods and soon shifted to working in digital graphics creation and spent most of his career working in that medium. He has earned BFA with sculpture as a focus and a strong foundation in printmaking in 2018. He now uses this mix of skills to create work in the fine arts..
Thomas’ experience is not limited to the arts. He has also worked as a river guide and in management in the outdoor retail and recreation industry for nine-plus years. He also has served in the US Army as in infantryman. All of this has provided Thomas with a well rounded and eclectic set of skills.
Jennie Hahn
Jennie Hahn is a civic performance artist working at the intersections of environmental stewardship, ecological arts practice, and public dialogue in her home state of Maine. Jennie’s methodologies are rooted in early community-based theater training with Cornerstone Theater Company, and influenced by her participation in the Catalyst Initiative, a program of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice.
Projects include Farms & Fables, an original play created in collaboration with Maine farmers, Choirspeak: The Maine Woods, developed from 50 interviews conducted in five Maine towns, and a co-designed partnership to incorporate performance techniques into policy development practices with Stephanie Gilbert of the Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation & Forestry. Since 2015, Jennie has curated In Kinship, a collection of collaborative civic performance works focused on environmental resilience and ecological recovery in the Penobscot River Watershed. Jennie’s work has been supported by the Kindling Fund (Space Gallery), Maine Arts Commission, Maine Humanities Council, Multi-Arts Production Fund, Ella Lyman Cabot Trust, and the Center for Performance and Civic Practice.
Website
www.open-waters.org
Video Links
https://vimeo.com/189190792
https://vimeo.com/118264289
Celeste LaForme
Celeste LaForme is fascinated by loss, change, and time: watching wasp holes in the desert sand, scratching horse teeth from an arroyo wall, listening to the caucus of bird varieties calling to one another in a spruce and birch canopy, standing still for baby deer bones. These moments have the power to influence our beliefs and the way we interpret our own value and place. Her paintings, drawings, and performances explore grief, joy, difference, tradition, alienation, connectedness, motherhood, destruction, and self in the tension between open landscapes and the unseen boundaries that land ownership asserts on them, between natural beauty and the human impact on the environment, and between freedom and the invisible, intangible rules, obligations, and regulations that comprise our connections to other humans.
Celeste was born in Medanales, New Mexico in an old adobe home along the Rio Chama. She received her BFA from the University of New Mexico. She has worked in the arts in several capacities working with children, managing a non-profit organization in Portland, Oregon, teaching art to school age children in rural communities, and seven years employment in film as a scenic artist and paint foreman. Her accomplishments in fine art include large scale oil paintings and drawings, murals, installations, film, sound, and performance art. Currently Celeste lives and works in Maine and also remains an active participant in the art community of her native New Mexico, where her work is represented in both public and private collections.