In the fifth Bien­nial at the Port­land Museum of Art, this year brings new names and new work to the con­tem­po­rary art scene in Maine. Once again, the museum received well over 900 entries, mak­ing it a dif­fi­cult task for the three jurors to win­now the field down to a man­age­able num­ber of artists whose works could speak to one another. In the end, the jurors (art dealer Ellen Miller of Miller Block Gallery in Boston, painter John­nie Ross who now works in New Mex­ico but for­merly taught at the Maine Col­lege of Art and inde­pen­dent cura­tor Judith E. Stein from Philadel­phia) did a remark­able job in select­ing the 61 artists and 98 works for the show. Only 17 artists have exhib­ited in pre­vi­ous bien­ni­als and this year’s exhi­bi­tion includes more videos, instal­la­tion pieces and works of pho­tog­ra­phy than ever before. But the sin­gle largest cat­e­gory for both sub­mis­sions and works cho­sen con­tin­ues to be painting—ranging from the fig­u­ra­tive to the abstract. In addi­tion to select­ing the indi­vid­ual pieces, the jurors played an essen­tial role in craft­ing these diverse works into an exhibition.

As John­nie Ross observes in his juror’s state­ment, “nature in its many man­i­fes­ta­tions has long been a sta­ple of the artis­tic vocab­u­lary in Maine. But what makes each bien­nial dif­fer­ent is the seem­ingly end­less and yet inven­tive ways in which artists explore the impli­ca­tions of our inter­ac­tions with the envi­ron­ment, both local and beyond. This year’s artists offer up leaves, flies, bird­seed, a lone pine tree, strange sea urchins, a pray­ing man­tis, garbage dump and the after­math of Kat­rina. A few depict tra­di­tional scenes of Maine, such as Robert Shillady’s stolid lob­ster­man paint­ing buoys, but in an almost comic R. Crumb style. Oth­ers push the con­cept of land­scape well beyond our bor­ders. Video artist Sam Van Aken, for exam­ple, exploits the “close encounter” between this world and outer space, between real life and the life of movies. Mon­ica Chau’s cau­tion­ary instal­la­tion piece fea­tures New Eng­land grave­stones carved with the images and names of endan­gered fish species and reminds us just how frag­ile nature has become in the mod­ern world. Land­scapes, from Sandy Litchfield’s mon­u­men­tal mural to Ethan Hayes minia­ture worlds, range from the lus­cious to the barren.”

New artis­tic per­spec­tives also give us ways in which to see and inter­pret the mod­ern land­scape, as in Yvonne Jacquette’s aer­ial view of the cor­po­rate offices of a giant credit card com­pany located in mid-coast Maine or in Tom Hibschman’s pho­to­graph of a com­puter cir­cuit board cov­ered in moss that looks just like an aer­ial view of an urban land­scape. In works by Yeshe Parks and Mary Aro, scraps of paper and piles of scrap com­bine to fur­ther remind us of the inter­face between nature and the man-made world.

New color pho­tog­ra­phy also com­ments on this rela­tion­ship, most notably in images by Christo­pher Becker, Scott Peter­man, Ben Rush and Elke Mor­ris that draw atten­tion to the rela­tion­ship between archi­tec­ture and built envi­ron­ment. Tanja Hollander’s empty land­scapes and A. D. Jacobson’s sky­scrap­ers, how­ever, move pho­tog­ra­phy fur­ther toward abstrac­tions of color and form. Even the insect world becomes part of this dia­logue with nature. In black and white images that hark back to older forms of sci­en­tific pho­tog­ra­phy, Denise Froelich focuses atten­tion on a pray­ing man­tis oddly perched in a human armpit, and Angela Deven­ney care­fully arranges fly spec­i­mens into geo­met­ric patterns.

This love of pat­tern and dec­o­ra­tion is another theme that runs through much of the work included in this year’s bien­nial. The pat­tern and dec­o­ra­tion move­ment, first pop­u­lar­ized in the 70s, comes alive again with new mean­ing in Vir­ginia Fleck’s man­dala made of recy­cled plas­tic bags, in John Mey­ers’ life-size canoe painted as if it were Delft-ware china and Joel Saeth’s col­or­ful wall­pa­pers con­structed of words that relate to inti­mate rela­tion­ships. In the pure abstrac­tions by Jeff Kel­lar, Jenny Gard­ner, Pene­lope Jones and Henry Wolyniec, pat­terns emerge from the cre­ative use of wide-ranging mate­ri­als includ­ing casein, resin, clay, silk rib­bon and printed paper. Today’s abstract artists also tend to work in series, so the exhi­bi­tion includes mul­ti­ple works by artists such as Ian Blethen, Astrid Bowlby, Christo­pher Keis­ter and Meg Brown Payson. Bowlby, whose large-scale, cut paper instal­la­tions have appeared in the last two bien­ni­als, is rep­re­sented this year by four small but densely packed ink draw­ings. Her black and white work is a per­fect foil for Dun­can Hewitt’s faux fire screen carved in wood and James Marshall’s bold graphite cir­cles, which also explore issues of abstrac­tion artic­u­lated through spe­cific artis­tic media and methods.

Most of the six videos included this year sim­i­larly deal with images of nature, some quiet and med­i­ta­tive in mood, oth­ers with a sense of humor. Two, by Sam Van Aken and Melanie Fian­der, also exam­ine the con­cept of per­sonal iden­tity, a sub­ject that emerges in other media as well, espe­cially in self-portraits. Jes­sica Yankura obscures her dig­i­tal pro­file by the repet­i­tive stamp­ing of fin­ger­prints all over her face and Mar­tin Steingesser presents him­self in a small, self-deprecating car­toon image. Seri­ous yet funny, these artists man­age to bal­ance aspects of indi­vid­ual iden­tity with larger issues of life. Marcy Hermansader’s tiny por­traits of Iraqis, drawn from news­pa­per accounts of the war, are encased in abstract shapes that, as she puts it, “cre­ate a silence around them so that their lives and ours have a place to inter­sect.” The 2007 Port­land Museum of Art Bien­nial is all about such inter­sec­tions: nature and the human pres­ence, abstrac­tion and fig­u­ra­tion, humor and seri­ous­ness. Under­stand­ing just where these aspects of our lives meet is what art is all about.