UMF Gallery Displays New Work By Kate Sibole

Megan Turcotte
Contributing Writer

Local artist Kate Sibole is giving art to a whole new meaning, quite literally. The art gallery has hit the ground running at UMF with Sibole’s digital artwork exhibit.

“Up Against The Sky” by Kate Sibole.

“The gallery has an academic mission to bring real contemporary art to the region,” curator Sarah Maline said. “Now that we have lost gender studies, which is a huge blow, we are going to try and have at least one show a year focusing on gender and identity issues in a contemporary artist's voice.”

Maline, has been at UMF 25 years and explained that Sibole was one of the first artists that showed at the gallery and her work was “very, very different.” Sibole focuses mainly on digital art and photography.

“Digital art has an interesting place and I think she really pushes it,” Maline said.

Sibole has taught at Southern Maine Community College since 2000. She works in the Communications and New Media Department teaching digital art, photography and animation.

“I really love that part of my life where I get to make stuff everyday. You know, I sometimes drive onto campus and I’m like wait a minute this is my job. Nobody, I hope nobody finds out how much fun I have,” Sibole said.

Sibole attended the University of Delaware and received her undergraduate degree in Art History with an emphasis in history of photography. She went on to receive her BFA in Photography and Printmaking and degrees in photography and animation from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Sibole comes from a long line of artists: “Access to a life that was really built up around art, you know, my father was a woodworker for an artisan, my mother practiced in the arts, as well and it was just a part of the thread of our being. I like to say that there are no doctors or lawyers, or even useful mechanics in our family. Just a lot of artists,” she said.

She uses a “seed image” that she has already taken and turns it into something else. “That is the meditative process that I connect to that mandala process of just zoning out, I’m letting my hands do these set of steps that are pretty similar in all of them and it’s just this expansion of pixel information,” Sibole said. She uses a photoshop process to make the mandalas.

“That is the meditative process that I connect to that mandala process of just zoning out, I’m letting my hands do these set of steps that are pretty similar in all of them and it’s just this expansion of pixel information,” Sibole said.

“Gardening at Night” by Kate Sibole.

Sibole has a collection titled “Push, Pull, Place,” she explains that this collection is a play on the photography terms “push” and “pull” which belong to a technique that is used when photographers have “messed up.”

“It’s a way of taking the information that is in the film already, like it’s there, and you are kind of forcing it to have a bigger presence in the end image,” Sibole said. She explains that she has been using photoshop since she was a sophomore in college.

“Our memories have all of these layers, all of this stuff, all of this story, tucked away, and sometimes it’s a place that will trigger that,” Sibole said. This is the idea behind the deeper meaning of the “push, pull, place.” Sibole has places she goes to all of the time and photographs the same thing over and over again to create several different versions of the image.

Sibole’s exhibit will be at the gallery now, through Oct. 8. Some of her pieces will also be displayed at the library. The UMF art gallery is located at 246 Main Street with gallery hours on Tuesday-Sunday and by appointment through contacting Sarah at at maline@maine.edu.