By Gillian Graham

Staff Writer

With the rhythmic clicking of metronomes echoing through cavernous mill rooms, Amy Stacey Curtis will watch as visitors row by row undo a year’s worth of crocheting. 

She wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Without their participation, my work remains unfinished,” Curtis said.  

Curtis, an installation artist from Lyman, opened her sixth biennial exhibit, Time, at the historic Pepperell Mill in Biddeford last weekend. The exhibit, open for 99 hours in 16,000 square feet of the former textile manufacturing building, explores interconnectedness through nine interactive installations. 

The audience becomes part of the installations, which Curtis said completes the piece of art. Each installation is accompanied by instructions, which ask the audience to manipulate, maintain, enter, detect, distinguish and contemplate time in new ways.  

“For this show, I was particularly interested in exploring our perception of how time passes,” Curtis said. “I’m trying to explore interconnectedness, how we’re all part of a whole and how precious that is.”

The first installation, “timeline II,” is a graphical representation of the chronological sequence of events of the exhibit. The audience is asked to use a pencil to carefully fill in the square corresponding to the exact minute they spend with the installation. “Pendulum III” features nine metronomes started at the exact same time each morning, while “pendulum IV” shows nine pendulum chime clocks built by Curtis, her husband, Bill Curtis, and her high school art teacher, Stan Colburn. The clocks were started and will be stopped at the same time and Curtis will record the variations that come from each clock’s unique character. 

In one of the three exhibit rooms, 99 hourglasses are lined atop a 64-foot pedestal for “flux III.” With sunlight from large windows filtering through the hourglasses, Curtis said she wanted to create a continuous flow of sand for the 99 hours the exhibit is open. With the help of audience members, Curtis turns over an hourglass at the start of each hour. 

Other interactive installations include a sound booth where the audience stands in the dark to listen to 99 people count out their perception of one minute. At “forward V,” the audience is invited to watch a projection loop of 365 still digital images of a road near Curtis’ house. For more than a year, Curtis took a photo of the road every 25 hours, taking a step forward each time. While standing in a darkened tunnel, audience members watch seasons stream across the screen, punctuated by images of the road at night. 

Curtis said she was surprised by the number of guests who have resisted interacting with an installation that features a 72-foot-long, 9-foot-wide piece of fabric she spent 365 hours crocheting. She has asked audience members to each undo one of the 1,521 rows and place the extra yarn in a glass box. When the piece is unraveled, she will consider it complete. 

“I never really know what will happen. Some people said they couldn’t undo it. I didn’t anticipate people would feel that way,” she said. 

Curtis said she came up with the theme of this biennial exhibit while taking down a previous one. Her previous biennial exhibits are Retrospective: Experience (Lewiston, 2000); Movement (Westbrook, 2002); Change (Brunswick, 2004); Sound (Waterville, 2006); and Light (Sanford, 2008). Future exhibits will be Space in 2012; Matter in 2014; and Retrospective: Memory in 2016. She plans to publish a book about the exhibits in 2018.

Curtis spends 22 months preparing each exhibit. 

Curtis, Maine Art Commission’s 2005 Individual Artist Fellow for Visual Art, presents her exhibits in Maine mills, which she said are an appropriate space for her work in part because of their size. She said she also sees connections to her work in the repetitive nature of the buildings – bricks, columns and windows are repeated throughout – and the work that was done there.

“People were doing the same thing over and over, but doing that thing just a little different each time,” she said. Curtis repeats some of her pieces with each exhibit. 

Curtis credits finding the Biddeford mill space to Engine, a nonprofit group that promotes arts in Biddeford. Co-founder Joshua Bodwell said he was able to act as a guide for Curtis as she looked at various downtown spaces for her exhibit. 

Bodwell said Cutis’ exhibit will draw people to the city, including people who may have not previously been to Biddeford. It also provides a unique experience for people to see a mill space that has never been open to the public, he said. 

Time is a “powerful” exhibit that engages people in a different way than simply standing in front of a painting at a gallery, Bodwell said. He credited city officials and the code enforcement office with working with and supporting Curtis as she prepared the space for the exhibit. 

“We hope it’s the tip of the iceberg,” Bodwell said. “Biddeford has the space to launch these sorts of events. It lets artists know it’s a community where they’re going to be embraced.” 

Time is open from noon to 5 p.m. daily until Oct. 28 in the Pepperell Mill, 2 Main St., Biddeford. There is no charge for admission and people participate at their own risk. The exhibit is not appropriate for small children. For more information, go to www.amystaceycurtis.com. 

Staff Writer Gillian Graham can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 213.