Works by Harlan Crichton in “36 Windows” at the Gingerbread House in Norway. Photos by Ben Troutman for Lights Out

Two shows put on by the ever-innovative Lights Out Gallery are closing Oct. 13, and it would be a pity to miss either of them. Fortunately, they are just steps away from each other in Norway: “36 Windows” occupies the Gingerbread House, a dilapidated Victorian manse as you head out of town, and “Marking Time: A Measure of Craft,” is in a historic carriage house some yards away next door.

According to novelist Dean Koontz, “Houses are not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.” I’m not sure if this is completely true, but certain kinds of architecture can certainly awaken our haunted selves, or at least evoke buried melancholies from the past.

Earlier this year, Lights Out Gallery sponsored its first residency. It invited six photographers to work “in dialogue with the town of Norway and the Gingerbread House,” which has been serving as exhibition space until it can be sold. The structure looks great outside (like most of our out-facing human facades), but inside it’s a rather decadently dilapidated shamble.

The photographers – Neville Caulfield, Harlan Crichton, Chelsea Ellis, Nick Gervin and June Kim – are already a pretty eccentrically inclined bunch. But what seems apparent for most of these artists is that the house pushed some common themes up to the surface. Much of the work has to do with an almost elegiac vein of memory, aging and death, and something mysterious that persists beyond physical life.

Gervin, for example, who shoots mostly at night, offers “I.N.R.I.,” a picture of St. Joseph’s Cemetery with a crucifix and mourners, or the slightly unsettling “Murder.” The latter’s title refers to a collective gathering of crows, their outlines here barely distinguishable against the inky sky. The likely reason we notice them at all is because their two dozen or so pairs of eyes are eerily glowing in the dark.

Neville Caulfield’s work is also full of night and shadow. His “Anvil” takes place in a field, where a naked Caulfield, who looks to be in the glare of headlights, appears to have just shot an arrow into his doppelganger/alter ego. In “Untitled” and “Killdeer,” Caulfield and his shadow strike poses in what appears to be a gymnasium. There is a homoerotic thread running through many of these – the first recalling paintings of St. Sebastian (a martyr often eroticized in art), the second Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th century time-lapse photography of a naked tennis player or nude youths playing leapfrog.

Neville Caulfield, “The Heron”

Caulfield can be sly, as with “The Heron,” another naked self-portrait in which he strikes a classical pose right out of a Renaissance religious painting. But he stands by a lake wearing a rather priapic duck mask over his genitals. There also seems to be an aura about many works that foreshadows the inevitable end of youth (or in the case of “Anvil,” lurking dangers that can kill, damage or diminish the beauty of young bodies).

June Kim’s series of photographs chronicling her mother’s mental decline from Alzheimer’s are the most poignant works in the show. On “Heaven,” a picture of her mother lying on sheet-shrouded furniture, Kim writes, “I have to part ways from you. I will be on my way to heaven—leaving all of you behind.” Your heart will break watching a video of her mother holding a receiver up to her head as Kim plays a teenage phone message from a friend who insists “You have to call me back now. Now!” Her mother looks by turns confused and alarmed. The point is clear: Her mother is beyond reach, disappearing from the now.

Like Caulfield, she can also be witty, as with a chandelier she creates out of tiny Polaroids of her and friends having fun, which she adorns with rhinestones and magic marker.

Chandelier by June Kim

Crichton uses flashlights to create odd squiggles of light on photos of the Norway woods, an abandoned metal shop, people watching the eclipse. They suggest currents of energy or spectral presences invisible to the naked eye. Ghosts? Extraterrestrials? Who can say?

Ellis explores memory, or perhaps things coming into manifestation then disintegrating again, in “Seeds and Moons.” Here, she photographs hundreds of tiny colored spheres against a blue surface streaked with light. Step back from it and we notice the spheres form a figure that is either coming into or out of existence. And Scott Vlaun creates still-life photos from the house’s artifacts – a ball peen hammer, a mallet, a folding ruler – setting them on radiators or against various surfaces. He also shoots his parents’ scrapbooks commemorating a birth, a birthday, a wedding, etc.

CRAFTY INTENTIONS

“Marking Time” is an exhibition co-curated by artists Diana Arcadipone and Judith Schneider that features 15 Maine artists. It dwells in that liminal space between craft and art by examining the way traditional materials-based techniques of craft drive expression. It turns out to be an intriguing look at a distinction that seems to be increasingly meaningless.

Kate Chapell, “Mountain Time IV”

Kate Chapell, for instance, is a revelation. I most often identify her as a painter of Monhegan Island scenes: rocks smoothed by streams and the sea, forest clearings and other landscape elements. But here she shows monotypes of mountains called “Mountain Time IV” and “Mountain Time V” – one of them bowing two-dimensionally toward the viewer – against paper crisscrossed with hundreds of hatch marks. It is a print as well as collage and a drawing, and its paper components qualify it as fiber art too. So, what is it (other than a visually sublime way to mark time, that is)?

Diana Arcadipone, “Tree Ring in Maine”

Arcadipone embroiders (a materials-driven craft if there ever was one). But she does so onto Southern magnolia leaves which she frames, changing our perception of what utilitarian uses embroidery once solely served. And what happens when wood sculptor Don Best collaborates with vitreous glass mosaic artist Judy Mayberry? How can we classify (for those who like pigeonholing things) their “Mosaic Sticks.” Sculpture? Craft? Hybrid?

Part of the exhibition’s pleasures is seeing how creatively mounted it is. Jessyca Broekman’s handmade books sit atop stacks of bound copies of the Advertiser Democrat. Christina Watka’s glazed clay shards flutter across exposed slats and studs of the carriage house walls. Jonathan Mess’ sculptures of reclaimed ceramics sit atop a sheet of wavy corrugated plastic. Don Best’s carved-wood “Bird with a View” – a bird atop a cat atop a dog that is like a folksy version of Maurizio Cattelan’s taxidermy animal pyramids – stands on the working turntable that once allowed carriage to be easy turned to exit again.

There’s terrific work here, but it’s also a lot of fun.