Works by Rick Fox, courtesy of the artist and Gallery NAGA Boston. Photo courtesy of George Marshall Store Gallery

Maine’s southernmost towns, Kittery and York, are hosting two exhibitions that could hardly be more different. One is mostly about painting (“Parts & Wholes,” through Sept. 29 at the George Marshall Store Gallery) and is filled with brushy verve and bright color; the other (“Yoav Horesh: The Village,” through Oct. 5 at Buoy) is black-and-white photography and quietly melancholic and pensive.

“Parts & Wholes” is a charming and wonderfully hung show. Curator Toby Gordon asked nine artists to create a collection of works that, when viewed together, formed a cohesive composition and concept. In most cases this came to be, though in at least two cases, the “cohesive” part of that equation doesn’t quite hold together.

Kate Emlen’s is in the former category. She takes one image of trees and breaks it down into constituent parts, almost as if she painted one large work and cut it up into 12 individual miniature works. Hung in a tight grid, we see the whole picture. The bottom three oil-on-linen works form the ground of the scene, with the sea visible through the bases of tree trunks. As we move up three more rows of three paintings each, we find ourselves in the treetops, with only sky visible behind. Each of the dozen paintings is beautiful in its own right, yet together they mirror the mind’s process of assembling a scene by observing its component elements. Oddly, though there is no question about the overall unity of the installation, I think I prefer considering individual works since, taken singly, they are more interesting compositionally within their tightly cropped framing.

Rick Fox, on the other hand, creates cohesiveness through palette and painting style, yet each work in his grid is a different landscape rendered in an array of deeply saturated jewel tones. Some feature rolling hills and farmland, some have rural structures in them while others do not, two include bodies of water (a river and a lake). I find this more rewarding visually than the jigsaw puzzle-style dissection of a single image. It feels like each little work is a discovery on its own, especially because all 12 are lushly painted in a gestural, expressionistic way that conveys a sense of a lot being packed into each 12-by-9-inch canvas. Single images build on each other to leave us with a powerful blast of color and mood.

Works by Carole Rabe, installation view. Photo courtesy of George Marshall Store Gallery

Equally intriguing, but more personal, are the works of Carole Rabe, who paints different rooms of her home illuminated in various ways by the changing light of the day. Unlike Emlen and Fox, Rabe’s impressionistic canvases are not all uniform in shape, though the irregular grid they create does end up confining itself to about the same approximately 5-by-6-foot wall space as others. The various sizes give each room or vignette its own dignity and individuality, as does the ever-changing light.

But by presenting multiple views that range from pulled-back to medium distance to closeup, Rabe also re-creates the action of moving through the house, in and out and around rooms. For example, “Two White Chairs” shows the titular seating within the context of the whole room. They appear in the distance of a more wide-angle composition. But in my favorite painting, “Living Room at Night,” we have come nearer to the chairs, and stand above them in close proximity. Here, the individual parts seem more interesting than the whole, especially when they are tightly focused and at oddly foreshortened angles like “Living Room at Night.”

Sarah Haskell, “Indra’s Net,” site specific installation with Maine beach stones, naturally dyed and waxed linen threads, corsage pins Photo courtesy of George Marshall Store Gallery

I have seen the beach stone spirals of Sarah Haskell before, with their partial jackets of crocheted madder-dyed linen. Then, as now, I find them very moving. There is something reverent and caring about swathing them lovingly in material, and the spiral has for centuries symbolized so much – cycles of birth and death, the womb, galactic orbital patterns, the interior chambers of seashells. Universally graceful and elegant, Haskell’s spiral sculptures naturally resonate deep within our being.

Now Haskell is also creating wall sculptures in a series called “Indra’s Jewels” that do not, at least for me, have the same quietly powerful impact. There is something about the serenity of a spiral that cannot be matched in these “tumbles” of stones that hang from cast iron hooks that feel too visible and distracting. “Indra’s Net” works better to capture the concept of a net of jewels that infinitely reflect each other. It would have been even more persuasive and potent if she had found a way to suspend this “net” across the room rather than against a wall. Buddhist cosmology is the unifying factor throughout, yet somehow these feel, despite their unity of material, more disparate than one might expect. For me, the spirals, with their individual graduated stones, are enough to respond eloquently to the directive of the title.

Works by Toby Gordon, installation view. Photo courtesy of George Marshall Store Gallery

There are other takes as well. Toby Gordon intriguingly mixes traditional land- and seascapes with totally abstract canvases that recall painterly versions of Frank Stella’s Protractor series of geometric paintings. Amanda Case Millis’ grid of paintings does not coalesce as others do. She is an adept landscape painter clearly interested in the effects of light – from peachy sunsets to misty green fields to brooding skies illuminated by the moon. Each painting feels so resolutely its own that the grouping telegraphs something less harmonious. Which is fine, of course. But in her case, individual parts seem more powerful than the whole.

CONSTANCY OF CHANGE

I wish I had a quarter for every time someone asked – upon hearing that I’d lived in 14 homes by the time I was 17 – “Were you an army brat?” The truth is that my father was a traveling salesman who was often shuffled to different regions to establish new territories, then an entrepreneur who founded businesses, sold them and moved his family of six children to wherever the next opportunity lay. So, I understand the transience of the armed services culture, where one is stationed for a while somewhere, then moved on to another base in another state or country.

Apparently Yoav Horesh, in his exhibit “The Village” (through Oct. 5) at Buoy, understands this too. In 2021, he, his wife and daughter Raphaela moved to Admiralty Village, a circa 1940 modular-home community built by the U.S. Navy to house some of the 20,000 personnel working at the nearby Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. World War II was raging, and the population – civilian and military – swelled to service the boom in submarine building. Certainly, members of the Navy were frequently circulated out to battleships at hot spots in the Atlantic and Pacific, and as the war ended and production ramped down, units started to be sold.

Yoav Horesh, “June 2021” Photo courtesy of the artist

In other words, we are talking about a neighborhood that has been in transition for almost 85 years. A picture like “June 2021” – depicting Horesh’s wife breastfeeding their baby in a corner of a room in their new home that is empty but for luggage and shopping bags – gets right at the sense of houses whose residents change as old families leave and new families arrive.

There is new construction that changes the complexion of the neighborhood, as in the pile of cinderblocks mounded by one property in “April 2024.” Even those who persist in staying are affected by the vicissitudes of the economy as their owners cannot maintain upkeep of their houses. “February 2022” and “May 2022” capture the same house from the identical angle. Though four months elapsed between these images, one broken window remains unrepaired, still stuffed with insulation to keep out the cold.

Yoav Horesh, “May 2022” Photo courtesy of the artist

Shadows abound, often indicating past histories of people and place. Occasionally, they are of Horesh and his daughter, their penumbral outlines appearing at the bottom of the frame as Horesh stops to snap an image. But they are everywhere, including in the surrounding wooded areas as well as cast by trees onto lawns and houses. “October 2022” shows an immense skeleton standing outside of a house as Halloween decoration. But its presence, as caught by Horesh, feels more ominous – a kind of harbinger of hours, months and years moving on and, inevitably, death.

The show poignantly ends (or begins, depending on how you tackle it) with “December 2021.” The image is of a flock of birds taking flight after sitting for a time on power lines. We understand in this photo that the very nature of Admiralty Village from its beginnings was about migration, change and impermanence.

Horesh’s previous show at the Maine Jewish Museum in Portland asked viewers to contemplate our ideas about what we think a Jew should look like. Here Horesh seems to direct our attention to our nostalgic fantasies about the stability of home and our desire to stop time. Neither, of course, is more than an idea and, as such, necessarily unsubstantial and fleeting. Rather like life itself.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com