Memory Palace: Peter Walls
May 16 – August 23, 2025
Maine-based artist Peter Walls has created a stunning assortment of never-before exhibited shaped paintings for his solo-exhibition Memory Palace. While the artist has traversed woodlands around New York’s Lake Ontario, Louisiana, New Hampshire and Vermont, the Maine environment inspires this new body of work. Memories of the artist’s experiences exploring varied landscapes infuse these works, the wonderment of the terrain and its flora, along with emotions stirred by each the various locations. Walls states, “My relationship with the Maine landscape through these 20 paintings are meant to slowly invite you into my world. We live a meandering existence, never a straight line, and I want to evoke both the winding paths we take through the forest and life itself.”
These paintings are not traditional depictions of specific Maine locations, but rather composite creations informed by the visual memories of information encountered in places that, as the artist suggests are “personal memory palaces”. The focal point of the show is a large-scale, multi-paneled composition titled Bulwark (Schoodic Peninsula) which spans 17 feet and was created in response to ZAM’s gallery. The viewer is immersed in a vibrant landscape brimming with moss, lichen covered rocks and strategically placed fallen trees, that seem to lure one into the scene.
The artist’s skill as a painter and muralist is clearly evident in the exhibition by the scale in which he works, and the utility of creating multiple panels that join in a seamless composition. Walls accentuates the spirit of these imagined locations through the heightened color used to depict the natural details, and the silhouettes created by the shaped supports. “My use of color is intuitive, yet grounded in my journeys in the woods and waters of Maine. I am not in any way photo realistically rendering what I experience but letting my emotion of place and the magic it reveals come forward; I want you to feel my landscapes through my high-spirited palette, like a memory of a journey one has once made themselves.”, says Walls.
The exhibition offers two viewing experiences. In one gallery the large compositions predominate our vision, while in another 16 small-sized compositions—some of which are 12” tall—enliven the gallery with singular moments of contemplation.
