Join us on Thursday, November 19, 7 p.m., for an online artist talk by artist and curator Lissa Hunter regarding our current Flight exhibition. This talk will be streamed live on our Facebook page.

Break, Lissa Hunter

Flight.

Moving through air, real or imagined.

A first airplane flight is a curious thing. It’s a curious thing especially if one is a child. No feeling of wind in your face. No vertigo. No getting small as the plane diminishes when seen from the ground. It actually feels, surprisingly, rather bland and unremarkable.

But when Peter Pan and Wendy flew over the Tower of London in the Disney movie of 1953… well, that was flying. Nothing bland or unremarkable about that. That was my first true memory of flight.

For a passenger, an airplane holds none of the freedom of the swooping, curving, three-dimensional path Wendy and Peter navigate, arms stretched out to their sides. In fact, an airplane feels constricting and decidedly not free compared to their voyage to Neverland.

As with many words, there are meanings other than the first to come to mind. Birds, certainly. Airplanes, of course. Rockets. But also a fly ball in baseball, a flight of stairs, a fly in the ointment, fly by night.

There are so many ways to look at flight. And each of them might take us, or at least our minds or our memories or imaginations up… and away.

Eight Maine artists present work based on their individual interpretations of flight. Arrows. Sledding. Space. Freedom. Superheroes. Escape. Butterflies. Fleeing fear.

And, yes, birds.

~ Lissa Hunter