There are so many places to see art in Maine, including under-the-radar locations you might not call back to check. Ane such site is Borderland, the former eatery, cinema and mixed-use space in the Fort Andross Mill building that anchors Brunswick's chief drag. "Mill Works 3" (through Jan. 31) brings together 26 artists who occupy studios in the former mill.

Starting in 1809, the massive building harnessed the strength of the Androscoggin River to ability an enormous performance that produced cotton fiber for yarn. It failed a couple times and renewed itself a couple times before falling into disrepair in the 1960s. In 1986, it was purchased and renovated into offices and studios.

Michael Gilroy established Frontier in 2006 as a venue for film, food, music and art. After shutting downward at the start of the pandemic, the restaurant space reopened on Nov. 3 as a gallery and cafe, and its "welcome back" show features 26 artists who have studios in the building. The bear witness was bundled by Borderland employee Kristyn Platt, in collaboration with Richard Neat, i of the exhibiting artists (who contributed colorful nautically inspired graphic abstractions that are easy on the eyes – even mannerly – in their simplicity and one-dimensionality).

There'due south a lot of interesting work to see here. Simply because the space was almost recently a restaurant, information technology has its challenges. Many works are hung likewise high in order to clear one-time restaurant built-ins, such equally partitions. This as well makes getting close to a few works hard, as it forces the viewer to look at them either shut but off to the side, or straight on but further dorsum.

The generality of the rubric nether which this fine art is assembled can too exist problematic. It is a bit of a grab purse, uneven in terms of quality of work. It's as well not curated in the sense that Platt has grouped together works without much contemplation about how they complement, or distract from, each other. Her accent seems to be more on the final configuration of the wall rather than on its individual parts.

Nib Zingaro, "Urban Mural"

I salon-style wall, for instance, groups some of the bear witness's best works by Andrea Sulzer, William Zingaro, Ellen Gilded, Carla Weeks and others. But at that place is no connection among them, leaving each to fend for itself regardless of what is adjacent.

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Take 1 of Bill Zingaro'southward aluminum "urban mural" constructions. Information technology is strong, volumetric and masculine, and it literally pops out at the viewer. This pulls attending abroad from Carla Weeks' hypnotic, but smaller and subtler "Monochrome Study in Bluish 6" and "Monochrome Study in Bluish vii" under information technology.

Taken individually, each is powerful. Zingaro heats sheets of metal and hammers them into desired modular forms that he welds together into framed grids. They resemble two-dimensional topographic models produced from country surveys. The silver metallic has a hard, industrial presence emphasized by areas where the underlying canvas has divide, which Zingaro patched with smaller riveted pieces. Visually and viscerally, it packs a forceful dial.

Carla Weeks, "Monochrome Report in Blue 6"

Conversely, Weeks' canvases employ a few barely graded shades of deep cobalt bluish to convey abstruse forms that hint at architecture. Visually and viscerally, they are quietly profound. The colour is then lusciously thick that you can nigh taste it, and the gradation of shades is so subtle that it takes your eyes a minute to discriminate the various forms inside the frames. They require deep looking and telegraph a sense of peace that seems at odds with the formidable charisma of Zingaro's work.

The salon-style grouping as well ways some works are hung lower than optimal. Sulzer's boggling "Snow Packed" is a casualty of this. It deserves plenty of space around it to have in the intricacy of her process. It is made with oil-based printer'due south ink and watercolor, which Sulzer applies to paper in what seem to be hundreds of random, obsessively made marks.

Overall, the work appears to describe a snowy mountainside. But the marks confuse our sense of calibration and subject area. Sometimes clusters of curt lines can expect like trees, at other times like skiers. Other clusters tin can intimate whole villages perched on the mountainside. However others seem to be pes or hoof prints tracing the move of humans and animals across the snow.

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Andrea Sulzer, "Snow Packed"

As we look at sections of the painting, the details seem to motility and shift, constantly reassembling in our brain equally something dissimilar until nosotros have no idea what we're looking at. In this style, the composition feels unfixed and ungraspable in any meaningful mode, leaving united states of america suspended in some sort of unresolvable space. The interior sensation this produces is fascinatingly disorienting.

1 of Ellen Gilt's optically exuberant works also hangs on this wall (her work is also currently on display alongside her late married man Duane Paluska's at the Maine Jewish Museum). In this case, at that place is some connection. Golden credits an intensive drawing grade she took with Sulzer as the turning point in her fine art.

The "intensive" orientation certainly stuck. Like Sulzer, Golden's drawings tin can jar our sense of continuity. They are essentially composed of horizontal stripes. Merely Aureate obliterates their linear quality by breaking them with intervals of blackness ink that collectively form triangles, rectangles and trapezoids. These geometric shapes interrupt and completely fracture the horizontal regimentation of stripes.

Flanagan himself has a few wonderful abstract works in the testify. "Mumbles," on the wall opposite this one, has a distinctly rhythmic, musical quality to information technology. Its jumbled geometries create a sense of movement. Trapezoids and triangles can feel as if they're jutting out toward the viewer or disappearing into a void. Lines squiggle this manner and that, moving forward and curling back on themselves. All this conveys the individual elements in motion in a dance that feels energetic and improvisational.

In full general, the abstruse works are the most rewarding in "Mill Works three." Exceptions are Tina Ingraham'southward "Dune, Popham Beach, Phippsburg, ME" and Renuka O'Connell's "Forest Boards." Ingraham's impressionistic mode lends itself well to the subject matter of dunes, which, similar her soft-focus brushwork, tin seem to be shifting and morphing. It is traditional mural painting, simply she keeps the romanticism nicely in check with this piece of work. O'Connell uses ink to evoke the woods in wintertime. Only the image is non literal. Rather, information technology seems to have a dash of analytic cubism to it that intriguingly walks an edge between representation and abstraction.

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These artists' works and others are well worth a trip. Even when their presence seems like an anomaly among the company they keep, they reward our attention. A unmarried digital video by Elijah Ober, for instance, seems oddly placed in a small corridor leading to the movie house. Yet it is so visually absorbing that y'all will likely scout several loops of that snail tracing its path and revealing enigmatic structures in its wake.

Jorge S. Arango has written virtually art, blueprint and compages for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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