The two-person exhibition Earth Suits and Beast Machines at Cove Street Arts in Portland, Maine, orchestrates a compelling conversation between Boston painter Jennifer Amadeo-Holl and Maine sculptor Mike Libby. This thoughtfully curated show rewards careful attention, presenting work that resists easy consumption and demands genuine engagement from viewers willing to slow down and look deeply.
I spent considerable time in the gallery, talking through my experience with a friend as we free-associated and pointed out details the other had missed. This kind of sustained looking feels increasingly rare, and I won’t soon forget this show.
Amadeo-Holl’s paintings demonstrate a masterful command of oil paint that verges on the alchemical. Standing before Remotely Isosceles, I found myself drawn into lush passages of cream, yellow, and white pigment that contrast with more intimate strokes and drybrush marks of thinned paint. The work creates a dynamic tension between areas of pure abstraction, where color exists for its own expressive power, and more restrained passages where figurative contour lines and patterns emerge like whispered secrets.
The painting’s substantial scale allows these contrasts to breathe, giving viewers space to move between intimate details and the work’s overall compositional rhythm. Amadeo-Holl’s handling of paint feels both confident and searching, each mark contributing to a visual dialogue that continues to reveal itself over extended viewing. For me, the figurative storytelling remains secondary to the painting itself, bringing to mind the work of Philip Guston in particular—that ability to let narrative emerge from paint’s own logic.
Amadeo-Holl has much to say about the nature of animals, including humans, and the enigmas of living life. Yet her paintings resist didactic interpretation. Each work functions as a picture puzzle, but it is first and foremost a sensual poem—one that speaks through color, texture, and gesture before it speaks through symbol or story. This hierarchy matters. The physical pleasure of looking becomes the foundation for any meaning that might follow, ensuring that intellectual content never overwhelms the immediate, bodily experience of encountering paint on canvas.
In Mike Libby’s Jetsam Heart, beach debris is reconfigured into the form of a human heart scaled three times, various bits make up the different valves and chambers with braided rope cord as veins and arteries. The work functions as both salvage operation and autopsy, transforming oceanic debris into an organ that pulses with metaphorical life. This piece becomes a meditation on the human heart ripped from its body—not literally, but in the sense of how we’ve become disconnected from our own essential nature. The marine materials suggest both drowning and survival, making this heart simultaneously vulnerable and resilient.
At first glance, Libby’s hybrid creatures appear as amalgamations of organic forms and mechanical components that seem to challenge the natural order. But closer examination reveals something more profound: a meditation on the boundaries between the living and the constructed, between evolution and invention.
Fountain particularly demonstrates this layered complexity. The overall silhouette captures a whale’s form with startling accuracy, and I was initially drawn to its immediate beauty. But then I began questioning what it means to encounter a whale constructed from tiny fragments of a miniature world—fragments that evoke beach detritus. A fountain in this context could refer to a whale’s spout. Interestingly, the artist makes an art historical pun with a tiny replica of Marcel Duchamp’s infamous urinal-turned-readymade inserted under the whale’s eye. This artist’s particular skill is using formal precision as a gateway to deeper inquiry, allowing aesthetic pleasure to become the entry point for more challenging questions about life at this fraught moment.
Earth Suits and Beast Machines
Cove Street Gallery
71 Cove St., Portland, ME
Open: T-F 10 to 5:30 pm, Sat. 10 to 5 pm; Closed Sundays & Mondays Through September 13th @covestreetarts
About the writer: Adria Arch is a Boston based sculptor, painter and educator. Her work has been featured at Brattleboro Art Museum, the Fitchburg Art Museum, Danforth Museum and the Boston Sculptors Gallery. Arch recently completed a commission for Google. Her large scale suspended work will be on view at Boston City Hall in November and at the San Luis Obispo Art Museum in December of 2025. @adriaarch