Spectacle Box proudly presents Local Area Network, featuring the work of steve norton, Lindsey french, Alex Young, Jesse Potts, and Ann Bartges. This exhibit began with the question of how tracing the networks of personal and professional relationships that artists form with one another might inform an expanded understanding of works originating from disparate artistic practices. While much e-ink is spilt on the global scale and effect of the internet, it was the fundamental innovation of the local area network that transformed the manner in which devices and users engaged with one another. This exhibit takes its title from this technological development. Though the arts world is as globally interconnected, the immediacy and tangibility of the networks artists form locally and organically represent a prime driver of artistic innovation and a source of sustainable support.

Curator Michael N. Meyer’s idea for this exhibit started with the simple thought: I’ll invite a handful of artists to be part of an exhibit and then ask each of them to invite another artist to participate. (Were the gallery larger, he would have expanded the degrees of invitation.) In this way the primary curatorial function was to define the rules of a system and then engaging artists in playing them out. Though these rules do not implicate the artists’ content, style, or process, a conceptual through line nonetheless developed naturally between the four works in this exhibit.

The kaleidoscopic soundscape of norton’s beneath and above (2026) evolves algorithmically spatially and temporally. Field recordings of airborne and waterborn sounds in Bangor City Forest have been chopped into short snippets and reconstituted through a 4 channel Max/MSP patch. beneath and above presents the viewer with a soundscape that is at once an indexical record of a real place and a machine fabrication.

Young and french’s The Length and Breath (2026) is a socially engaged, scent-based project that engages Maine’s balsam fir sachet pillow to explore the state’s complex history of forestry, tourism, colonialism and industry. The “smellscape” of the ubiquitous balsam fir sachets found in tourist shops across the state is expanded to encompass a more holistic concept of the forest as a network of ecological, social, and industrial concerns.

Jesse Potts’s sculptures and assemblages are drawn from the everyday ephemera of life. He utilizes the meaning of objects and materials while subverting or recontextualizing our perceptions through scale shifts and trompe l’oeil patina in order to give form to hubris, folly, consumption, and mortality. The scale of To Be (2024) is a momento mori in confrontational detail.

Anne Bartges’s appetite for experimental approaches to digital media brings a sense of the unseen to the granular remnants of everyday life. Her Goldfish Project (2022), in which a lone Pepperidge Farm goldfish swims in a black void to the soundtrack of J.S. Bach’s “Aria” from the Goldberg Variations, documents the thin lines between struggle and joy, desire and futility.

Throughout the works in the show one finds a sense of expanded possibility in the experience of the everyday, an immediacy of the past in the present, and the commingling of the seen and unseen.

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Spectacle Box is a photographic collective formed by Todd R. Forsgren and Michael N. Meyer in 2017. It is a container enclosing ideas, images, books, and objects that function as a means for carrying into the world the artistic productions of a rotating cast of collaborators. The collective has participated in fairs across the United States and in Europe and has supported the publication of work by artists working with photographic technologies.

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Ann Bartges
Ann Bartges is a video artist with an appetite for experimental approaches to digital media. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Grimmerhus Museum in Denmark, Dark Horse Experiment in Melbourne, Australia and the Athens Institute of Contemporary Art, Athens, GA; and in Maine at Cove Street Arts, Portland and Waterfall Arts, Belfast. She has been an artist-in-residence at Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, Institute fur Alles Mogliche in Berlin, Germany, and Guldagergaard International Ceramic Research Center in Skaelskor, Denmark. Bartges teaches in the Art & Design program at the University of Maine Farmington, and is the Director of Emery Community Arts Center. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Michigan, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.

steve norton
steve norton is a sound artist, musician, researcher and educator living in Orono, Maine. He is focused on understanding the world by listening to it. His practice has shifted from music performance to field recording and soundscape composition over the last decade, motivated by his life-long interest in biology, ecology and the outdoors. steve is co-founder of the Island Soundscape Project and a board member of the Bangor Land Trust in Bangor, Maine.

Jesse Potts
Jesse Potts was born in Harrisburg, PA and currently lives and works in Farmington, ME, where he serves as Associate Professor of Art at the University of Maine at Farmington. He received his BFA from Alfred University in 2005 and his MFA from the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media, at Virginia Commonwealth University In 2012. Jesse has been an artist in residence at the I-A-M residency in Berlin, Germany, The European Ceramic Work Centre, s’-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, and The Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT. He has received grants from The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Maine Arts Commission, Vermont Arts council, The Kansas City Artist Coalition and VCU School of the Arts. His work has been included in exhibitions both nationally and internationally and reviewed by Hyperallergic and the New York Times.

Lindsey french and Alex Young
Alex Young and Lindsey french are artists based in Dedham, Maine. Their collaborative research draws from media and material studies, olfaction, and botany to engage ruderal ecologies in the wake of settler colonial land use and energy industries. Their work centers ruderal plant life and the atmospheric commons through multisensory, embodied encounters in projects like the Olfactory Media Library, supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry. Their work was presented at 4GROUND: Midwest Land Art Biennial, Radiophrenia at CCA Glasgow, and Uncommon Senses IV and V at Concordia University. Their project Scent Poems for Pipeline Plants was a Finalist for the 2024 Institute for Art and Olfaction Sadakichi Award.