PORTLAND — The Belfast area's Mid-Coast Salon will display over sixty complex and vibrant art works focusing on why “Art Matters.” With an opening on July 2 at the UMVA Gallery in the Portland Media Center, the works include paint, pottery, photography, and even construction. Exhibiting artists include nationally known painter, Harold Garde.

Kenny Cole offers three new works and former Camden-Rockport teacher Russell Kahn adds sgraffito pottery. Also included is work by Fredrick Kuhn, who won Honorable Mention in the state-wide Art2021 show at Harlow Gallery.

A significant component of the show is a collection of statements on each artist's interpretation of “Art Matters.” Kerstin Engman, who teaches art at UME and locally, says in part, in a Mid-Coast Salon news release: “TV, fashion, buildings, gardens, video, sculpture, theater, ceramics, painting...all exist because they pass through the hands of a skilled, trained artist or artisan.” She renders this broad view from interpreting landscape to depicting bottles that transform with shape and color.

David Estey, painter and founder of Mid-Coast Salon, said, “...artists are often at the forefront of progress, showing us...how to produce something we otherwise wouldn't experience.” His two stark abstracts provoke introspection especially in contrast to the color in his interpretation of Covid 19.

Greg Mason Burns stresses that “Artists Matter” and combines words, paint and photographs into a personal statement. He says that it's vital to understand the path to the work that always includes the artist's background and attachment to the piece.

Lesia Sochor and Andrea Assael agree that the artist creates but the viewer completes the creative cycle as art takes them beyond what they thought they knew. Ed Nadeau, a professor of art at UME, paints contemplative narratives left open to interpretation. Liv Kristin Robinson's photographs of arriving at the margins of New York City hold stillness as a metaphor for pandemic shutdown.

Several artists depict society such as the black history paintings by Leslie Woods. Carol Sloane's figure drawings tremble around fragile open spaces.

Inspired by her thoughts on immigration, they became “personal and intimate loss and societal and cultural loss.”

Three artists with backgrounds in architecture and mathematics generate ambiguity through seeming simplicity. John Silverio and Bob Richardson create art that ponders the relationship of elements while Michael Corden's individual Flexforms mesmerize as a collection.

The Salon brings new vantage points and will run from June 29 through July 30 at the Union of Maine Visual Artists Gallery at PMC, 516 Congress St, Portland. After July 2, exhibit hours are Monday, noon-5pm; Tuesday through Thursday, 10am-5pm; and Friday and Saturday, 1pm-4pm.