Royal Tar Collective: Mudflat Ekstasis

Amos Eno Gallery is pleased to present Mudflat Ekstasis, an exhibition of new work by the Royal Tar Collective. The opening reception will be held on Friday, September 29 from 7 - 9 PM at the gallery on the first floor of 56 Bogart St.

Mudflat Ekstasis presents work by the Royal Tar Collective created primarily during a residency at Pinea Linea de Costa in Rota, Spain, in the summer of 2017. Through sculpture, using such diverse materials as breast milk and rebar, performance, video, and photography, the artists confront the contemporary problem of the loss of ritual and ceremony that have historically given structure and meaning to life. These practices seek to engage the ecstatic, a moment of simultaneously being inside and out of the self, in order to approach, according to Plotinus, the ‘culmination of human possibility’.

The Royal Tar Collective is composed of artists Anya Antonovych, Sam Jones, and Heather Lyon, who each reside in the town of Blue Hill, Maine. They maintain independent studio practices while engaging in collaborative work. Life in Maine forces a close examination of the power of nature in the face of the urban paradigm of progress and dominion over nature; this schism is ripe territory in which the artists explore the tension between the visceral and the intellectual.

Anya Antonovych received her BA from McGill University in Montreal, a Post Baccalaureate Certificate from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and an MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. She has participated in the Red Gate Residency in Beijing, China, and has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. Through painting, photography, color, and physical interaction with landscape, Antonovych scrutinizes memory, broken narratives, and abstract moments. Her work is an attempt to reconcile a sense of uprootedness in her personal and political histories with an experience of time and place in a contradictory and often disorienting contemporary culture.

Samantha Jones received her BA from Wheaton, her BFA from the University of Maine at Orono, and her MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. She remains fascinated by the dialogue between the rational and the ecstatic, pairing industrial and synthetic materials with a baroque temperament. Jones is an assistant professor of Art at the University of Maine, and has participated in various residencies including the Vermont Studio Center. She has exhibited her work nationally and abroad, including Governors Island Art Fair in New York, and Little Berlin in Philadelphia.

Heather Lyon is a sculptor who, through her poetic choices of unlikely materials (ranging from rebar to sequins) notable for their metaphoric weight and her challenging task-based performance videos, interrogates interpersonal relationships and the ways we negotiate longing, loss, desire, power and vulnerability. Her work is at once romantic and analytical. She holds both a BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has completed numerous residencies, including the Vermont Studio Center and the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation Residency. Her work has been exhibited in both Europe and the United States. Most recently, she has been invited to exhibit video and performance art at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland, Maine, and to participate in a project-based exhibition ‘Living Room III’ at Artisterium, in Tbilsi, Georgia.