Artists & Writers is pleased to announce their inaugural exhibition The Lens of Attention featuring works by Lincolnville, Maine artist Dudley Zopp. The exhibition will open on Camden’s Third Thursday Art Walk, July 17 from 5 - 8pm and will be on view through August 28. A talk with the artist will be held on July 24 at 5:30pm.
Spanning three decades, Dudley Zopp: The Lens of Attention features a range of visually rich works including painting, watercolor, drawing, installation, and books. Taking its title from poet Mary Oliver’s phrase “the rich lens of attention,” the exhibition at Artists & Writers brings into focus the attention Zopp has paid to nature’s creations, beginning in childhood, and especially since moving to Lincolnville in 2007, having lived in Maine since 1996.
The works included in the exhibition create a map of the progression of her interactions with the natural world and the different places that have influenced them, in Maine, while away at residencies, and back to her home state, Kentucky. Each relationship to the landscape produces different critical questions that are worked out through her own representations but remain true to their source, the natural world. Through her work, Zopp conveys a message that each of us is intimately connected to the earth, that our survival depends on knowing how to care for rather than exploit the natural world, asking the question, “what is our responsibility?”
ABOUT DUDLEY ZOPP
Dudley Zopp (she/her) was born in Lexington, Kentucky. She received her BA and MA in modern foreign languages from the University of Kentucky, followed by postgraduate work in painting and drawing at the Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville. Zopp uses the disciplines of installation art, painting, drawing, and artist’s books to mirror her deep engagement with the natural world and her concern for our responsibilities as humans on a changing planet. Zopp’s early work explored the paleo-geological foundations of her environment, and since moving to Maine in 1996, she has increasingly focused on the intersections of studio practice and habitat restoration.
Zopp’s work has been shown at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, the Portland Museum of Art, University of Maine Farmington, Galerie Hertz, Louisville, KY, University of Southern Maine, Waterfall Arts, Belfast Maine, University of Maine, and Beech Hill, Rockport Maine with solo exhibitions at Coleman Burke Gallery, New York, June Fitzpatrick Gallery, Portland, and Moremen Gallery, Louisville, KY. Her work is in the collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum and her books are housed in the collections of Yale University, Bowdoin College, the University of Kentucky and Baylor University, among others. In 2002 she received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission.