For images/questions please contact Amy Stacey Curtis at 207-838-3390 or
amy@amystaceycurtis.com.

p r e s s   r e l e a s e

Amy Stacey Curtis's TIME in Biddeford, Maine
Amy Stacey Curtis's sixth solo-biennial exhibit of interactive installation
art, TIME, will take place October 9-28, 2010 throughout 16,000 square feet of
Biddeford's Pepperell Mill. The Maine Arts Commission's 2005 Individual Artist
Fellow for Visual Art, Curtis has been mounting these ambitious biennials of
different themes since 2000, nine exhibits total, one occurring every other
year through 2016. Each exhibit is 22 months of work, installed in a different
Maine community’s vast mill space, and requires audience perpetuation.

"Without the audience's participation, my work is unfinished." As with
Curtis's previous solo biennials, some of TIME's nine installations require
participants' physical touch or effect, while others function through
purposeful perception. Each installation has instructions, the instructions
themselves, an integral part of the art. Audience is asked to manipulate,
maintain, enter, detect, distinguish, recognize--challenged to explore the
concept of time in new ways.

Two of the nine installations at TIME: 
flux III is a straight, equidistant row of ninety-nine hourglasses, one for
each hour of the exhibit, on a 64'-long pedestal. After Curtis inverts the
first hourglass at 12pm on October 9, marking the start of the exhibit,
participants invert subsequent hourglasses successively, one per exhibit hour.
For undoing, Curtis has crocheted an hour every day for a year; all the yarn
continuous making a ~7-foot-by-81-foot white form. Starting on October 9,
participants undo the yarn from the form, placing undone yarn into a
7-foot-long, clear-plexiglas box. The piece is complete once it is "undone" or
once the exhibit ends 5pm, October 28--whichever comes first.

Curtis committed to this 18-year process to convey that we are a part of a
whole, that everyone and everything is connected and affects. Previous
solo-biennial themes have been: experience (2000), movement (2002), change
(2004), sound (2006), and light (2008), taking place in Lewiston's Bates Mill,
Westbrook's Old Sebago Shoe Mill, Brunswick's Fort Andross, Waterville's
Lockwood Mill, and Sanford's Millstone Place respectively. Future themes are:
space (2012), matter (2014), and memory (2016). Her hope is that in the end
her exploration might have been thorough, her 81 installations comprising the
nine biennials' imagery a cohesive wholehesive whole.

TIME is funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an
independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, and
a Rebel Blend Fund grant from Coffee By Design. TIME is sponsored by The Mills
at Pepperell, LLC (www.northdammill.com), and collaboratively sponsored by the
Biddeford arts non-profit Engine (www.feedtheengine.org). 
TIME, October 9-28, Pepperell Mill, 2 Main Street, Biddeford. Opening:
Saturday, October 9, 12-4pm. Other Hours: Every day 12-5pm. Free admission or
donation. Enter/participate at own risk. Not appropriate for small children;
vulnerable elements.

http://www.amystaceycurtis.com/
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xICdnjaT_fc