UNE Art Gallery in Biddeford explores medical, emotional toll of heartbreak in “Piece of my Heart”
The University of New England Art Gallery in Biddeford is now exhibiting “Piece of my Heart: A Laboratory,” a two-person show featuring works by Sophie Hamacher and Aliza Sternstein that will be shown through Oct. 26.
The exhibit is a study in the phenomenon of heartbreak as a lived experience that is both physical and emotional. Through the media of film, printmaking, sculpture, sound, and painting, artists Sophie Hamacher and Aliza Sternstein — along with sound interventions by artist Asha Tamirisa — explore and describe the heart outside of the confines of symbolic images.
Hamacher is an artist, teacher, and writer whose multidisciplinary work spans film, video, printmaking, and text. She also is the editor of “Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance,” a wide-ranging anthology of art and writing that examines the impact of surveillance on contemporary motherhood. Sternstein is a visual artist currently living and working in New York City whose paintings are filled with gestures and symbols and play with layers and transparency.
In “Piece of my Heart: A Laboratory,” Hamacher’s interdisciplinary work — presented in an immersive installation that anchors the exhibit — creates a carefully- calibrated space of inquiry and discovery around the motif, while Sternstein’s materially expansive paintings provide an emotive counterpoint, explained Hilary Irons, director of galleries and exhibitions at UNE.
“In this new exhibit, which spans the summer and into the fall, we see a remarkable confluence of ideas,” Irons noted. “Symbolic language, medical specificity, and material experimentation combine to form a powerful statement about how we envision the heart, heartbreak, and all of the narratives that go along with this subject.”
Hamacher’s short film “Visio Cordis” — which lasts 19 minutes and 30 seconds — explores the topic of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (also called broken heart syndrome) from both medical and symbolic perspectives. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is triggered by intense emotional or physical stress that causes the heart’s left ventricle to balloon, a phenomenon Hamacher calls a kind of shapeshifting.
“Named after traditional Japanese octopus-catching pots, the condition serves as a potent metaphor for how deep empathy or care might leave physical imprints on us,” Hamacher explained in an artist statement. “The installation draws attention to what is often unseen: the emotional labor embedded in our inner lives and the ways we are shaped by and through technology and medical representation.
“It asks how systems built to observe and measure —whether clinical or cultural — not only render the body visible but also shape how we interpret care, intimacy, and the act of looking itself,” she said.
The artwork can be viewed from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily at the Jack S. Ketchum Library, located at 11 Hills Beach Road, Biddeford, on UNE’s oceanfront campus. A reception with the artists, which is free and open to the public, will be held later in the fall at the gallery from 4 to 7 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 16.