Summer 2025

Marwa Abdul-Rahman is a painter and sculptor. She received an MFA from the ArtCenter College of Design in 2011, and prior to that studied film at Yale University. Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at MaRS Gallery (Open That Shit Wide Let Me See How Big Your Mouth Is, 2016), Wilding Cran (Eternal Return, 2019), and the Box LA (The World, 2022–23). 

About her art-making practice, in her own words:

“My practice explores ideas of power, perception, and transformation. Most recently, this interrogation has centered specifically around the cycle of life and death, especially life and death as illusions and/or boundaries. While I have been able to hear the invisible all my life, in 2019 I embarked on learning spiritual practices which would allow me to more clearly and specifically work in the unseen world. Rather than illustrations of what I see, my sculptural paintings are translations and impressions of the interaction with the unseen, encoded with a nonverbal language that speaks directly to the viewer. 

I am looking forward to the ways this residency in Maine will inform my practice and my life, as an artist who is interested in seeing the world through different perspectives. I reflect this attitude in my artwork with my use of mixed media and mixed practices (sculpture, weaving, tapestry, and painting), and often force unlikely companions onto the same plane in an attempt to create a new dialogue. 

Each project I work on is site-specific in that I begin by walking through the city, gathering found materials and detritus, which are charged with history/survival, and carry a tactility and intensity of their own. I then start a process of channeling and communion with the invisible world, forming a new body of work through the information I pick up from the streets, the conversations I have with the people around me, the books I am reading, as well as the objects I come across in the city. While I am never certain what I will make or what it will look like when I am done, the work always benefits from this inclusion of the unknown.”

Articles & Interviews

• https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2024/03/15/marwa-abdul-rahman-colm-toibin/

• https://www.artforum.com/columns/marwa-abdul-rahman-discusses-the-inner-lives-of-her-sculptures-243923/

• https://theboxla.com/show.php?id=7170

Robert Dewhurst is a writer and editor. With Joshua Beckman and CA Conrad, he coedited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners (Wave Books, 2015); and with Hedi El Kholti, he coedited Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian (Semiotext(e), 2024). His recent writings on poetry include an introduction to the expanded second edition of David Rattray’s How I Became One of the Invisible (Semiotext(e), 2019), a foreword to Alice Notley’s The Speak Angel Series (Fonograf Editions, 2023), and an afterword to the forthcoming fiftieth-anniversary edition of John Wieners’s Behind the State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike (Song Cave, 2025). For years, he has been writing a literary biography of Wieners, and in Castine, he will bring this project closer to completion.

ESSAY

https://the-song-cave.com/products/behind-the-state-capitol-or-cincinnati-pike-by-john-wieners

Hannah Burr grew up in Boston, now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and has exhibited her paintings, drawings, and projects nationally as well as locally, at places like the Drawing Center in New York City, and the Judith Leighton Gallery in Blue Hill. Burr has enjoyed a lifetime of annual visits to a home on Penobscot Bay which has informed her art practice for almost 40 years. She is the author of five books that blend visual art with philosophical inquiry about direct connection to inspiration, as well as new ways of seeing and being in the world. Hannah is a graduate of Brown University in Fine Art and Religious Studies.

hannahburr.com

Viktor Butko, born in Moscow in 1978 into a family of renowned artists, continues a legacy of Russian Impressionism, working both in Russia and in the USA. His artistic education began with his grandfather, Victor Chulovich, a celebrated painter in the Russian tradition, and continued at the Moscow Art School and the Academic Dacha of Artists under Alexey Gritsay and the Tkachev brothers. Based in Massachusetts, Butko is known for his landscape oil paintings of Maine and Long Island. Butko has received accolades such as "Five to Watch in 2023" from Fine Art Connoisseur, and Best in Show at the Rockport Art Association. His work is held in museum and private collections internationally, including the Vyshniy Volochok Museum collection, Collection of the IRRA, and private collections in Russia, China, Europe, and the U.S. Butko also teaches and accepts commissions from his Waltham studio where he lives with his wife and great painter, Kelly Carmody. Influential Russian artists Alexei and Sergei Tkachev have hailed his work as the "next generation of greatness."

Hannah Bureau is a French and American painter known for her abstract landscape paintings, often depicting New England coastal scenes. She blends abstraction and landscape using geometric shapes and visual planes to create structure and formal composition. Vigorous brushwork creates a sense of visual distance and depth. Bureau is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

“My paintings are at the intersection of representation and abstraction. I am interested in creating space and distance that feels like the familiar world around us but that is edited, and simplified. Visual plains and geometric shapes create structure and formal composition while keeping a sense of visual distance and depth.” 

Sara MacCulloch is a Toronto-based Canadian painter who is well known for her sublime landscapes and interiors which capture the feel of a place with minimalist brush work, subtle color, and vivid feeling in buttery oil paint.

A Nova Scotian native, MacCulloch holds BFA (1992) and MFA (2019) degrees from  the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, she has lived across Canada, exhibited extensively in North America, and is represented in galleries in Toronto, Maine, New York, and Chicago. MacCulloch has taught painting at Canadian art colleges and participated in residencies internationally. Her work is included in major collections like TD Bank and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and featured in publications on contemporary Canadian painters. A book about her work is forthcoming from St. Thomas University. Though based in Toronto, she maintains a strong connection to Canada's and New England’s East Coast.

Mara Korkola graduated from the Ontario College of Art, Toronto (AOCA); Wichita State University, Kansas (BFA) and the University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio (MFA).

She has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Canada, the US and Germany, including Painting as Paradox at Artists Space in New York, Synthetic Psychosis at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Auto-Motive: World from the Windshield, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Sequence and Passage: Mara Korkola and Monica Tap at Cambridge Galleries in Cambridge, Ontario, and Commuter, a comprehensive solo exhibition of her No Place series of paintings at the MacLaren Art Centre in Barrie, Ontario.

Korkola's work has been reviewed in Canadian Art, Border Crossings, C Magazine, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, and Now Magazine among others, and has been included in Carte Blanche Vol 2 – Painting, a national survey of Canadian painters. She was also featured on an episode of the television series The Artist's Life. Images have been reproduced in BlackFlash, Coupe Magazine and Harper's Magazine. She has received grants from the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work is held in private and corporate collections, including Scotia Bank, Fidelity Investments and Hydro Quebec.

Mara Korkola lives in Toronto.

marakorkola.com