2023 Faculty Biennial

November 9–December 10, 2023

Davis Gallery

The 2023 Faculty Biennial features works in a diverse range of media explored by art department faculty members Bevin Engman, Gary Green, Amanda Lilleston, Audrey Shakespear, and Takahiro Suzuki.

Artists

Bevin Engman

Bevin Engman was born in Connecticut and grew up outside of Philadelphia. She holds a bachelor of arts in English from College of William and Mary in Virginia, a bachelor of fine arts in painting from Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art and Design), and a master of arts in painting from University of Pennsylvania. She came to Colby College in 1996 to teach painting, foundations, and drawing.

As an observational painter, Engman has worked primarily with still-life. Her interests include the actions of perception and color’s ability to promote a sense of light and space, while illuminating the potential of objects to produce metaphorical meaning.

Through the 90s and early 2000s, Engman exhibited with Bachelier-Cardonsky Galley in Kent, Connecticut. She became a member of the New York City-based still-life painters group named Zeuxis, with whom she exhibited at fine art and university galleries, and regional museums throughout the county for 18 years. Her current work explores the social issues of contemporary American life. By placing objects in enigmatic arrangements, she seeks to offer the viewer a space to contemplate those issues in the hopes of gaining insight.

Bevin Engman, Resisting the Abyss, 2023. oil on raised wood panel, 8” x 8.”

Gary Green

Gary Green is a professor of art at Colby College, where he has taught photography since 2007. He received his master of fine arts from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Green’s work is held in many collections including those of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and in Maine at the Portland Museum of Art, and the Bowdoin, Bates, and Colby College museums of art.

His books are in collections at the Yale Beinecke Library, New York’s MoMA Artist Book Collection, Bowdoin College Special Collections, among others. After Morandi—a visual conversation with the work of the Italian modernist painter Giorgio Morandi—was published in 2016 by L’Artiere Edizioni in Bologna. When Midnight Comes Around, published in May 2020 by Stanley/Barker, contains a selection of work he made in New York City in the 1970s and ‘80s of the downtown music and art scene, and The River is Moving/The Blackbird Must be Flying, a photobook of new landscape work, was released by L’Artiere in late 2020. Almost Home, his third book with L’Artiere Editions, is scheduled to be published in 2024.a p

Gary Green, Untitled (from Long Island Pastoral: Part 3), 2023. Archival pigment print, 22″ x 17″.

Amanda Lilleston

Amanda Lilleston is a visual artist living in Maine. After receiving her bachelor of arts in biology from Colorado College, she worked as a field biology assistant and a wilderness EMT at the Cape Eleuthera Institute in the Bahamas. Lilleston went on to get an interdisciplinary master of fine arts, interweaving science and studio art, from the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design. Her artwork depicts a long and evolving relationship with human anatomy, physiology, and ecology. Using printmaking techniques and paper joining, Lilleston transforms zoological/anatomical/botanical imagery into adapting structures and environments.

Lilleston has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally including the International Triennial Colour in Graphic Arts in Torún, Poland; Boston Printmakers North American Print Biennial; and the Atlanta Print Biennial. Through December, her work is featured in a solo exhibition at the University of Maine’s Zillman Museum of Art in Bangor. She has prints in permanent collections at the Munakata Shiko Memorial Museum of Art in Japan, the Southern Graphics Council International Print Archives, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, among others.

Her most recent work investigates how cyclical changes in our shared environment mold our experience of time.

Amanda Lilleston, Möbius landscape 1, 2023. Woodcut print collage, 34″ x 20″ x 16″

Audrey Shakespear

Audrey Shakespear is an independent studio artist, technician, and instructor. Her studio practice centers on classical stone carving and contemporary digital media to explore how our physical and digital environments shape our view of reality. Audrey uses research into historic stone carving formats and techniques as a catalyst for both conceptual and technical components of her work. She was a Fulbright-Nehru Scholar in India (2019–20) and that research led indirectly to her current studio projects linking hand-carved stone objects and digital “data objects.” Audrey studied at Utah State University and The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Her sculptures are a study of the beauty and possibility inherent in digital communication and design, and a meditation on the core connection humans have to the solid materiality of our physical world.

Audrey Shakespear, Sandstone Object 4, 2020. Sandstone, 70 x 102 x 64 mm.

Takahiro Suzuki

Takahiro Suzuki (he/him/his) is an artist currently residing in Portland, Maine. He completed his bachelor of arts in studio art from the University of Virginia, concentrating in the mediums of photography and cinematography, and received his master of fine arts in film, video, animation, and new genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

His work and research practices as an artist serve as a form of inquiry. Each investigation offers a path toward further curiosity, rather than a grasp toward certainty. The end product for his works is not so much a thesis upon which to land, but rather, an open hypothesis for the audience to consider. His works have exhibited and screened nationally and internationally. Suzuki also serves as the co-founder and co-curator of aCinema, a collaboration with Janelle VanderKelen that presents experimental film and video screenings at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Takahiro Suzuki, electric moonlight & the language within the leaves, 2023. 7 min 55 sec, Super 8 film transferred to video.

Banner image: Amanda Lilleston, untitled (detail), 2023.