Adams and Ollman is pleased to announce Commonplace, a solo exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist Mariel Capanna. Opening on Saturday, September 13, the exhibition explores limitations of memory, time and distance through a series of small-scale, speculative landscape paintings. Commonplace is on view through October 25, 2025, and is Capanna's third exhibition with the gallery.

For this new body of work, Capanna compiles and watches vintage 8mm home movies of family vacations and road trips anonymously uploaded to YouTube. Known for the time constraints that guide her painting process and determine her compositions, the artist watches these digitized reels and races to paint what she sees. 

"I start each painting with no real sense of where it will land," said Capanna of her process. "My only expectation is that each painting will feel vaguely like a landscape. I guide the painting gently in that direction, allowing myself to stumble upon a horizon line, and then maintain it." Each painting is made with a distinct palette that she mixes ahead of time. "I glean these palettes from daily life," she explains. "One was gathered from an afternoon outside with [my son] Horace—t-shirt, shorts, helmet, scooter, sneakers, socks, grass, gravel. One was borrowed from an album cover; one is from a postcard that I received; a few are plucked from paintings that were on my mind." 

Marked by dense accumulations of vibrant color, impasto paint and gestural marks, each work contains allusions to the images and notations that represent the iconography of the American road trip: streams, seas, fences, patches of grass, flowering bushes, sun hats, palm fronds, meadows, mountains, sand banks and birthday cakes. Within each canvas, shifting views glimpsed through multiple car windows and camera lenses are condensed into the picture plane, allowing the long road, seasonal changes, wide-ranging activities and encounters and myriad places to collapse into a single image.

The visual structure of each panel is dense with clunky, chunky marks extending to the edge. What we see is part of a continuum—only some of the picture. Past and present, here and there, presence and absence collapse into one cacophonous surface. 

Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA) received a BFA and Certificate of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT. She has been an artist in residence at the Guapamacátaro Art and Ecology Residency, Michoacan, MX; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; and the Tacony Library and Arts Building, Philadelphia, PA. Capanna is the recipient of the Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship and an Independence Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. From 2021-2023, Capanna was the Mellon Post-MFA Fellow in Studio Art at Williams College, Williamstown, MA, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, and a Fresco Instructor at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME.  Capanna's solo exhibition, Giornata, is currently on view at the Clark Institute, Williamstown, MA, and in 2026, Capanna will be the subject of a MATRIX exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT.