Dozier Bell

Dozier Bell

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The University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor will be presenting work by Dozier Bell from June 25 through September 18, 2004.  In these paintings, Bell superimposes the markings of cartography and remote sensing technologies such as radar, sonar, and LANDSAT, on sky and landscapes, star fields, and other natural phenomena.  She explains, “Remote sensing technologies are, in some sense, twentieth century versions of the twelfth century German concept of Heimsuchung.  Its original meaning – a visitation by God – gradually gave way to its use as a term for the singling out of a person or people for visitation by disasters such as plague, famine and war; and yet the term still encompasses these two extremes of human experience: everyday union with the divine, and the devastation and annihilation of the physical self and/or its environment. These images seek to encompass both our present-day awareness of the potential for destruction on an unprecedented scale, and the corresponding vastness of the divine.”

Dozier Bell, from coastal Maine, studied painting with renowned landscape painter Neil Welliver at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.  Since her first solo show in 1987, Bell has received a number of awards including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation; she has been a Fulbright Artist-in-Residence at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, and was the 1997 recipient of the Maine College of Art’s Achievement Award, as well as an honorary doctorate.