Her Eyes Are Like Doves Besides Streams of Water: Genesis Belanger, Amy Brener, Ellen Lesperance, Christina Ramberg, Morgan Ritter, Diane Simpson, Emily Mae Smith, and Alice Tippit
July 14–August 12, 2017
Adams and Ollman is pleased to present I Was A Wall, And My Breasts Were Like Fortress Towers and Her Eyes Are Like Doves Beside Streams of Water, two exhibitions featuring painting, drawing, text and sculpture which represent or reference the body, in parts, as code, sign or symbol.
The exhibitions respond to the metaphors of "blason anatomique," a 16th century poetic device wherein the female body is dissected into fragments. In these anatomical love poems, eyes, breasts, lips, thighs are isolated and glorified; as various parts of a woman's body are desired, the whole is ordered, divided and subsequently, ruled.
Like the "blason anatomique," the artists included in these exhibitions often focus only on a fragment–a head, torso, or finger. However, in so doing, the artists do not objectify or catalogue, but rather construct a new monument or totem, one which reimagines the figure's erotic, surreal, contentious, and formidable potentialities. Using a combination of oppositional, defiant and hybrid forms and employing abstraction, among other devices, these artists approach the subject through the lens of history, language, design, science fiction, craft and architecture to take over the blason tradition and reclaim a space for the body, one that is contemporary, subjective and subversive.
installation view: Her Eyes Are Like Doves Besides Streams of Water
installation view: Her Eyes Are Like Doves Besides Streams of Water
installation view: Her Eyes Are Like Doves Besides Streams of Water
installation view: Her Eyes Are Like Doves Besides Streams of Water
installation view: Her Eyes Are Like Doves Besides Streams of Water
installation view: Her Eyes Are Like Doves Besides Streams of Water
installation view: Her Eyes Are Like Doves Besides Streams of Water
installation view: Her Eyes Are Like Doves Besides Streams of Water
installation view: Her Eyes Are Like Doves Besides Streams of Water
installation view: Her Eyes Are Like Doves Besides Streams of Water
Alice Tippit
Blanche, 2017
oil on canvas
18 x 14 inches
atippit0060
Alice Tippit
Stranger, 2015
oil on canvas
28 x 22 inches
atippit0062
Ellen Lesperance
Sister, You Don’t Look Like A Revolution, Hard Lines on Your Face and Faded Eyes That Blink and Water in the Sun., 2017
gouache and graphite on tea-stained paper
22 x 29 1/2 inches
ELes 97
Christina Ramberg
Untitled (torsos), c. 1971
ballpoint pen and colored pencil on paper
4 x 6 inches
CR 11932
Diane Simpson
Drawing for Peplum IV + Pattern, 2015
graphite on two sheets of vellum graph paper
25 x 22 inches
DS 20319
Genesis Belanger
Soft Pack, 2017
stoneware
14 x 11 1/2 x 9 inches
GBel 02
Emily Mae Smith
Marlene, 2017
graphite, watercolor, ink on paper
10 x 8 inches
EMS 02
Amy Brener
Invisibler (Ice), 2017
76 x 20 x 4 inches
silicone, pigment, found objects
ABre 01