Past Exhibition

Emily Davis Adams

Ground

March 23 – April 27, 2014
Artist Reception: Sunday, March 23, 2014, 5 - 7 p.m.

IMAGES

CB1 Gallery is pleased to present the first commercial gallery solo exhibition of New York artist Emily Davis Adams. Continuing the artist’s visual conversation between Conceptualist, Minimalist and realist painting, the exhibition Ground opens on March 23, 2014 and will be on view through April 27, with a reception with the artist on Sunday, March 23, 5 - 7 p.m.

For this exhibition, the ground in the paintings of Emily Davis Adams serves as both a surface with a history of activity and as the basis for other artistic considerations. “When I work I move back and forth between the creation of illusionistic space and a fully non-representational relationship with the process, the surface of the picture, and even the formal considerations relating to its shape,” says Ms Adams.

There is a rich parallel between the surfaces we pass over on a daily basis (roads, paths, sidewalks, etc) and the surface of a painting: All share antecedent human acts of incessant mark making. But, as a painter, Adams is equally interested in intense observational painting–of, for example, the best of the Dutch flower painters–as she is in the Minimalists. She doesn’t consider the two modes of art-making to be all that distinct from one another because they both yield to an utter respect for what is, making the artist less a creator and more a vehicle for something that already exists to be realized by the beholder.

Adams’ work explores aspects of contemporary American landscape through an ongoing dialogue between multiple painting languages. With a background in environmental policy, much of her recent work has focused on the structures, mark-making and material that are a part of the super-structure and infrastructure of the landscapes with which she is familiar.

Emily Davis Adams was born in San Francisco, California and grew up in a family of artists and musicians. She studied art at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is a graduate of UC Berkeley (BS) and the New York Academy of Art (MFA). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is an adjunct professor at Montclair State University and Queens College. This is her first one-person exhibition with CB1 Gallery.