Down The Candy Hole

Diamond Duryea ∙ Abigail Grace Marsh ∙ Sara Stites

February 2 - March 11, 2023

Featured Artist

About the Show

Featured

Sara Stites

I am not telling one story, precisely, but am describing the feeling of being within a story, one with an undecided outcome and one that is decidedly feminine.

Abigail Grace Marsh

I am interested in exploring the mind’s relationship to the body in the graphic forms of drawing, paint and textile based art.

Diamond Duryea

I’m an artist self-taught by trial and terror. Straight lines and clean shapes are my safe place but can get dull now and then.

Down the Candy Hole is a three-woman show featuring vibrant, somewhat trippy paintings and mixed media objects by Maine artists, Diamond Duryea, Abigail Grace Marsh, and Sara Stites. All three artists, in their own way and through their respective media and practices, create fantasy worlds onto which they project and explore submerged aspects of their interior being. The palettes trend bold, and the complex relationship between mind and body/conscious and unconscious is represented through the works’ figurative and biomorphic elements.

Stites’s work is populated by dynamic, cartoonish characters: some human, some animal, some human-animal hybrid, and some pure fantasy. Certain of her characters are assertively rendered in a thick, graphic black line, while others manifest in washes and whispers. Through these colorful characters, Stites examines “issues of vulnerability and the uncanny.” Duryea’s work includes a dollhouse for monsters. Not scary ones like Vecna or Nosferatu – they’re lovably humanoid by virtue of their habitat, clothing, activities, and habits, and feel like claymation. A separate, free-standing sculpture is a minimalist outline in raw meat red, suggesting both a coil spring predator trap and the outline of a predator’s jawline. Two sharp white fangs and a dangling uvula are included. Marsh’s artist statement speaks her intrigue for “the overlap between the internal and external world, and specifically, our conscious and subconscious perception of the body as one of these boundaries.” In keeping with that concept, the skin and clothing of Marsh’s female figures is covered entirely in the graphic and colorful geometric background patterning of the quilts and paintings in which they are situated, in a manner reminiscent of the psychedelic art of 1960’s counterculture. The color combinations of her non-objective abstracts vibe a bit cosmic as well.

The work in this exhibition is wild, whimsical, often witty and, like the show’s title, blends a youthful exuberance and imagination with a dash of danger or disorientation. The fitting title was inspired by a sweet and funny, though vaguely creepy story from Duryea’s childhood….. Once upon a time, when Diamond was but wee, while playing alone outside near her family’s home in rural Western Maine, she stuck her finger down a hole in a bench at the edge of the forest and was surprised and delighted to discover –- wait, what!?! -- candy! Who put that there? Brimming with wonder, she dug it out and looked it over. Though the wrapper was intact, she thought to eat it must be wrong. But candy is good and her temptation was great, so she unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth. Delicious! Nothing bad happened, so she didn't tell her mom. And lo and behold, the next day, to Little Diamond’s even greater surprise and delight, she found another piece of candy stuffed in that same hole! She ate that one too, and for great number of days thereafter, there’d be a fresh little candy, bench-holed and awaiting young Diamond’s arrival - left by an old hermit who lived in those woods. They never met or even spoke, but they both lived happily ever after.