BRANCHING OUT: "Offering," by Gary Ambrose, grafted beech and maple, Maine shale, and pigment; November 2007.

The Maine College of Art Faculty Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art is teeming with offerings from instructors from every department. The resulting melange is informal and benevolent, teachers teaching by example. A perusal of the entire show is worth your time if for nothing else than as a reminder of the varied artistic approaches MECA offers its students. Three pieces in particular should serve as sufficient lures to pull you through the door.

GARY AMBROSE’s “Offering” protrudes from a bed of shale. A slender, smooth, small maple tree stands upright, sanded down intuitively to reveal a human grace. In the implied movement, you can discern something like a dancer posing for the camera. Ambrose cuts the tree short, shaving off branches to achieve a totemic effect. Only one branch is left, stretching out into a multiplicity of finger-like branches. This personification is reinforced by the artist dyeing the branch indigo such that those reaching fingers begin to look uncannily like human veins.

LING-WEN TSAI AND NATHAN KOLOSKO are at it again with another video and sound presentation from their “Water & Wind” series. “Bottle” invites us to follow a green plastic bottle as it nearly achieves bobbing across the close-up frame of the camera. It floats along a gently undulating body of water amidst pelting raindrops, two steps forward, then one step back. The soundtrack of singing bowls and chimes are felt more than heard and the audio and visual combine for a unity conducive to meditation.

MARGO HALVERSON mixes in a stand-alone lesson among her photographs and collaborative design pieces. A small monitor presents a five-minute video that has all the expository feel of a lecture. “I want to start with a question,” narrates the artist as she takes us through a slideshow of images and presents a hypothesis out of autobiographical material. Halverson invites us to consider personal geography and how we interpret place in our creative processes. “Do we each embody a place we insert into our work again and again?” she asks while offering a suggestion of place as a cognitive result of repetition gone unnoticed, frozen moments and glances. Once a teacher, always a teacher, and the lesson is gladly accepted.

No excuses to not buy local
In contrast to the vampiric commercialism that an American Christmas often promotes, Portland artists tend to band together for celebratory bazaars to sell their wares. Combining music, good people, and a sip of holiday punch sure beats going to the mall. Here are three ways to find unique and creative gifts without leaving the peninsula.

SNOWBALL AT FIELD | 74 India St | Dec 7, 4-9 pm
Proprietors Colin Sullivan-Stevens and Freiderike Hamann promise that this year's Snowball event will have the atmosphere of buying a Christmas tree from a roadside stand. Plop a few marshmallows in your cocoa and check out their porcelain snowballs, lanterns, and film projections while shopping for limited-edition printwork, drawings, paintings, wood-fired pottery, jewelry, and papergoods.

FREE FOR ALL + SHOP-A-DO! AT SPACE GALLERY | 538 Congress St | Dec 12, 4-10 pm
Free For All opens this First Friday, runs all month, and is a damn good idea. SPACE Gallery went out on a limb, experimenting with an open call inviting anyone to submit work for a salon-style survey show. The experiment worked perhaps too well, because they may have to start hanging work in the bathroom when they run out of room for the 200+ works of art that came through the doors. Granted, the quality of work varies wildly, but the juxtaposition in the gallery become a work of art itself, a curatorial quilt celebrating our local community.

The fourth annual Shop-a-do! features wares by far too many of the area’s finest designers and artists to mention here: 43rd Parallel Press, Swallowfied, Ferdinand, Karen Gelardi... better check www.space538.org for the full lowdown.

OPEN STUDIOS AT THE ARTIST STUDIO BUILDING | 536 Congress St | Dec 7 5-8:30 pm
There won’t necessarily be price tags next to the work, but what’s better than walking into an artist’s own studio and picking out your favorite work? (Throw in food or health insurance for a discounted price.) Local sound machinists Tempera will be playing music in the elevator shaft, which always spells holiday fun.

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Ian Paige: ianpaige@gmail.com