Lisa Adams

Petrichor

February 25 – April 9, 2017
Artist Reception: Saturday, February 25, 2017, 4 – 7 p.m.

• Genie Davis, ArtScene, Lisa Adams and Michael Mancari, March 31, 2017
• Jacqueline Bell Johnson, ART AND CAKE, Lisa Adams, Petrichor at CB1 Gallery, March 30, 2017
• Lita Barrie, The Huffington Post, Lisa Adams’ Fictitious Worlds @ CB1 Gallery and College of the Canyons Art Gallery, March 22, 2017
• Ezrha Jean Black, Artillery Magazine, Lisa Adams – Petrichor, March 16, 2017
• A. Moret, Installation Magazine, Lisa Adams “Petrichor,” an exhibition of small paintings at CB1 Gallery, February 24, 2017

CB1 Gallery is pleased to present our fifth exhibition of the work of LA-based artist Lisa Adams: Petrichor. The exhibition features a group of new small paintings as elusive and distinct as petrichor—that pleasant smell which accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather. The exhibition will be on view from February 25 through April 9, 2017. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Saturday, February 25 from 4 – 7 p.m.

Petrichor is Lisa Adams first solo exhibition of only small oil paintings in the past fifteen years. The paintings in this exhibition are far more complex than any of her earlier small paintings and in fact, apart from scale, are more closely related in planning and methodologies to her recent larger work; only their execution is diminutive.

Content-wise, they are large paintings and in reproduction their scale is unknowable. They are each powerful, expanding outward before pulling you in. They basically belong to landscape and still life genres. Some are hybrids of both and some elements feel interchangeable between genres. Within the twelve small paintings there is a range of approaches and manipulations; some feel like graffiti or found objects, some feature built- structures—solid or tentative—while others illuminate invented places—poetic, curious and remote. There is action and interaction and an invitation to decipher.

Adams began these paintings during the sixth year of a long Southern California drought and completed them shortly after the first rains of winter—thus petrichor. Individually, each painting demands conjecture on the part of the viewer and as a group they are far reaching. They build their confidence by relying on each other; they are larger than the sum of their parts. Mostly they are about place and a fluctuating state of existence in response to that place.

Lisa Adams is a painter and public artist, who has a B.A. from Scripps College and an M.F.A. from the Claremont Graduate University. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been an artist-in-resident in Slovenia, Finland, Holland, Japan and Costa Rica. Her many accomplishments include a Fulbright Professional Scholar Award and her work is in the public collections the San Jose Museum of Art, the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, the Laguna Museum of Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art and the Edward Albee Foundation.