ON VIEW
May 7 – 16, 2026

OPENING RECEPTION
Thursday, May 7, 5 – 7 pm

Abigail G. Cloutier

@HelianRuby

Abigail Cloutier is an interdisciplinary artist working in Portland, Maine. She works primarily in creating installations utilizing animation with an interest in expanding how we understand time. Her work has been exhibited in various group shows including MFA '26 thesis show at the ICA in Portland Maine, ARMOR, at Creative Haverhill in Haverhill Massachusetts, MFA Summer show in 2024 and 2025, Generations at Danforth Gallery in 2023, and her undergraduate senior thesis show Who we are, What we do at Emery Arts Center and UMF Gallery in 2022. In 2022 she received a BA in Visual arts from University of Maine at Farmington and her MFA from Maine College of Art & Design in May 2026.

I make temporal installation works that utilize the process of animation to illustrate my own idiosyncratic experience of time. As someone who grew up with ADHD, time has always been something that escaped me. I was always late or super early, could never complete chores in the right amount of time and even struggled to understand when to eat. Time is elastic, seconds stretch into hours and days into minutes. It is a Time that does not connect with clock time.
    Animation is a large part of my process as it becomes a tool for me to engage with time as a medium. I am interested in the use of installation and animation to create work that abstracts time and plays with how we perceive it. Using drawing, video, animation, and painting I begin to create my own clocks to measure time.
    Queering time becomes a goal to create a possibility of time that is outside of clocks and societal expectations. By exploring alternate expressions of time I am able to offer a redefinition of the relationship we have to time and clocks.



The MFA Thesis Exhibition for the Class of 2026 incorporates a range of making practices spanning themes including the natural and built environments, the uncanny, the everyday, health, grief, and personal and cultural histories. With an emphasis on both the personal and the global, these nine artists make a variety of contributions through ceramics, drawings, photography, prints, sculptures, and sound and video installations. The nature of their work and research demonstrates the caliber and cultural relevance of MECA&D’s MFA Studio Art program.








Institute of Contemporary Art
at Maine College of Art & Design
522 Congress St. Portland, ME 04101

Gallery Hours:
Wed–Sun, 11:00am–5:00pm,
Thursday, 11:00am–7:00pm