You Don’t know me

Carly Glovinski
Rachel Grobstein
Duncan Hewitt
Justin Richel

September 21 – November 23, 2024

Sarah Bouchard Gallery is thrilled to host the final show of our 2024 Season.

You Don’t Know Me brings together the work of four contemporary artists whose practices are based on the careful remaking of particular things. Through an alchemical process of observation, gestation, and creation, both the artist and the observed change — bringing a new, transitional object into form — a thing in suspension between being and becoming.

Exhibition Views Featured Artists Selected Works Press

Carly Glovinski

Carly Glovinski lives and works in Seacoast, NH. She received her BFA from Boston University and has been awarded residencies at Surf Point, the Studios at MASS MoCA, and Canterbury Shaker Village, and grants from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, and the Blanche Colman Trust.
She has had solo exhibitions at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York where she is represented, Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA, and Colby College. Her work has been in group exhibitions at institutions including Polygreen Culture and Art Initiative, Delphi, Greece; Farnsworth Art Museum, Portland Museum of Art, Decordova Museum, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Boston Center for the Arts, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey.
Glovinski is currently the inaugural summer fellow of the The Gund Gallery at Kenyon College. Her “living work” Wild Knoll Foundation Garden, an oceanside footprint garden in Maine inspired by the home and writing of May Sarton, is currently in late summer bloom and going to seed.
I was originally drawn to typeset drawers for their symbolism as holders of language — literally — their practical use was the storage of letter blocks for typeset printing. I also like their appearance in thrift stores and flea markets, reborn as a kitschy wall display, meant to display tiny collections of various items, curated by its owner, each compartment its own little stage.
Over the past 10 years, I have made various works that include a trompe l’oiel painted book. These books have been placed on chairs and hidden in library shelves. In these two works, I am looking at this collection of sculptures as both self-referential and illustrative of my interests and environment.
Reference forms a self-portrait of sorts, with the titles or subject matter of the books combining to reflect a cross-section of my creative motivations. Library becomes a little gardening library that points to other major themes of environment, landscape, and the labor of care in my work.

Books on gardening displayed on a wooden shelf against a white wall.

Mixed objects on a white wall: a small empty cardboard boat, a pile of books in a cardboard box, a wall-mounted wooden crate with writing, and a wall-mounted wooden object.

Rachel Grobstein

Rachel Grobstein is a Philadelphia-based painter and sculptor. She is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Sculpture, a Museum of Arts and Design Artist Studios residency, a Roswell Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, a Jentel Foundation fellowship, a Hammersley Foundation Grant, a Studios of Key West residency, and a Vermont Studio Center Full Fellowship and Residency supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Solo exhibitions include Galleri Urbane (Dallas, TX 2020), Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago, IL 2018), Next to Nothing Gallery (New York, NY, 2018), and the Roswell Museum and Art Center (Roswell, NM, 2017).
Grobstein received her MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in Philosophy and Visual Arts from Bowdoin College.
I create miniature sculptures and paintings based on objects from everyday life. I often work in series investigating artifacts, souvenirs, and collections. My work isn’t aimed at replication; I’m interested in capturing specific gestures — tactile and material qualities which are often transformed in the process of making. These pieces invite close scrutiny through a radical scale shift. The details unfold slowly, in conversation with the amount of time it has taken to create the work.
My work often explores the objects found in liminal or transitional spaces. A recent series of sculptures is based on real-life roadside memorials, layering homage upon homage. This project explores how collections of objects in memorials offer a powerful language of loss, love, and memory, and how these places for negotiating grief and trauma become portraits of the deceased, as well as those they have left behind. Another series of miniature tableaus is based on the objects found on people's bedside tables. I began by asking friends for pictures of their nightstands and then expanded the series to include colleagues and strangers across the country. These biographical collections of objects speak to universal themes, from memory and self-care to sexual identity and dream life. Other work has explored dashboards and rearview mirrors, museological displays of artifacts relating to the UFO phenomenon, and scavenger birds.
I am currently at work on a series about the past few years of my own life, navigating my daughter’s birth, the complexities of the transition to motherhood, a miscarriage, separating from my husband, and revisiting the death of my own mother twenty years ago.

Duncan Hewitt

Hewitt was born in New York City in 1949 and grew up on Long Island.
Having graduated from Colby College (BA) and the University of Pennsylvania (MFA), he worked at a Maine boatyard and foundry before becoming a Professor of Art, now Emeritus, at the University of Southern Maine.
His work has been shown with prominent 20th and 21st-century artists.
In 2016, the Portland Museum of Art presented Duncan Hewitt: Turning Strange, a selection of Hewitt’s work from the previous twenty years. In 2024 his work was exhibited in a two-person show at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art. In addition to a dozen solo shows (four at the ICON gallery), he has completed five public art projects.
I see particular things — things that look back at me. I remake them, most often carving and painting wood.
There is close observation and a making process that is old. At the same time, they are off-kilter — something new felt in suspension between it is and it isn’t — no longer what they seem to be.
This grows from a collaboration — a vulnerable space between myself and a source — during which both change.

Art gallery with two wooden sculptures, small framed artwork, a vertical wooden piece on the wall, and a black door.

A row of small artist paintbrushes with colorful paint residue on the bristles and handles, arranged in a line on a white background.

Justin Richel

Richel received a BFA from the Maine College of Art and Design and later studied the technique of icon painting at the Franciscan Monastery in Kennebunk, Maine.
He has been awarded residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, Monhegan Artist Residency, Kohler Arts & Industry, and RAIR.
His work is held in the collections of the Portland Museum of Art, the John Michael Kohler Art Center, and Fidelity Investments. It has been exhibited widely at numerous museums and art centers including the Wadsworth Athenaeum, DeCordova Sculpture Park & Museum, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Fitchburg Art Museum, and Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D.
Painting is perhaps the most plastic and malleable of all artistic mediums. There is no resistance to the artist’s hand. It captures and encapsulates every bit of the artist; from the thought to the hand, to the canvas. The physical, mental, emotional, and energetic are recorded in the paint. The movement of a sore shoulder, selfish desires, and the pain of existential dread stick to the surface of canvas. In this way, every painting is a self-portrait.
With an interest in artifice, simulacra, and trickster mythologies, my most recent body of work delves deeper into the inquiry of painting itself. The impetus for this recent body of work began with a simple line of questioning.
“What is a painting?”
Perhaps the simplest answer to that question is its materiality. - Traditionally: Paint, canvas, and wood supports.
“What is the function of a painting?”
- A window, a portal, an aperture
- A framework or ideology
- An object of and for contemplation
- A perceptual lie / a conundrum / a quandary
Adhering to the subsequent list, the work is simply constructed from paint, canvas, and wood.