KALEIDOSCOPE: Camera obscura special effects. |
Anna Hepler, proprietor of the Map Room at 58 Fore Street, teaches printmaking at Bowdoin College but continues to live and create in Portland where she landed a few years ago after following a friend and ending up briefly teaching at the Maine College of Art.“I feel totally committed to Portland as being an excellent home base,” she says. “I had been chasing projects and ideas leading me to New York, out west and to Asia, and this is the first time I’ve chosen to stay because of the place itself.”
Her choice to reside at the oddly-shaped complex that sprawls across the lower eastern promenade arose from an initial fascination with the curious sense of space. Intrigued, she approached the building owner and secured studio space for her work. The small vestibule that is now the Map Room was an offhand icing-on-the-cake offer that materialized a little later.
“This studio space was the map room for the foundry that was once in the building. All the guys drafting would come here to confer on the projects. I named the space because of that function, especially since at first I thought this was going to be strictly about works on paper,” she says.
“By the end of the first season, I realized the space is this perfect discrete size, to use as a petri dish for onsite projects. It’s almost a perfect cube. I thought each year I’ll come up with a theme and invite artists to work with the space. Last season, I invited three artists and they picked their own collaborators. No one had worked together previously.
“At first I was struggling to make it a pristine gallery, for whatever reason. I was very controlling about the space. Starting with the collaborations, I didn’t know what was going to happen, I had to let go and provide a space for something to unfold.”
Currently, The Map Room houses the work of Hepler’s Bowdoin colleague Michael Kolster. For the show, entitled “comeandsee,” Kolster evokes a lesson in optics and perception entirely from the site itself based on the principle of the camera obscura.
“This season, I wanted to use the space as an image-making tool,” says Hepler. “The third show of the season will be Phuong Nguyen from New York who’s doing a piece called ‘Apparatus.’ I think it’s going to be a mechanized device working off the opening and closing of doors to create some sort of drawing machine.”
The physical mystique surrounding “comeandsee” is the key to its success. The viewer walks into the vestibule and is enshrouded in darkness. There are a few little pinpricks of light poking through blacked-out windows but not quite enough. Instinctual alarms to go off. What is going to happen?
The anticipation is perhaps something like initiations into the ancient Mystery Schools which subjected prospectives to elaborately organized rites, sometimes dangerous, often in darkness, designed to illuminate mystical precepts that a prophet cannot properly put into scripture.
Gradually, your eyes begin to make out some colors and shapes as they adjust to lack of light. At first, it looks as though the sun poking through the pinhole is illuminating some sort of photographic print, and then a car zooms by and you realize you are observing an inverted image of the street outside.
