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Peggy Chiang: barn burner
September 13—October 25, 2025
Brooklyn-based artist Peggy Chiang (b. 1989, San Francisco, CA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) will have her first solo exhibition on the West Coast, opening at Adams and Ollman in September. Titled barn burner, the mixed media sculptural installation includes works that explore themes of the American West—oil, stock, rationality, and units of measurement. Like her past works, Chiang begins with an image—here, a saddle—and engineers it into an uncanny likeness of the real-life object. Around this central piece, Chiang expands a non-linear narrative with a series of precarious mobiles constructed from old measuring weights and cast iron meat hooks that, with the slightest touch, could tip the scale. Oil, wire hangers, bandsaw blades, shirt collars, roll-up gates, and bone—the artist's materials list suggests a violence that is omnipresent in American identity and engenders a resonance that echoes out from the four walls of the gallery into the architecture, structures, and systems that make up modern life.
Mariel Capanna: Commonplace
September 13—October 25, 2025
In Commonplace, Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA; lives and works in Swarthmore, PA) explores the limitations of memory, time, and experience through a series of small-scale paintings marked by dense accumulations of vibrant color, impasto paint, and gestural marks that cohere to form a speculative landscape of streams, seas, fences, patches of grass, flowering bushes, sun hats, palm fronds, meadows, mountains, sand banks, and birthday cakes.
For this new body of work, Capanna compiles and watches vintage home movies of family vacations and road trips anonymously filmed on 8mm and uploaded to YouTube. Known for the time constraints that guide her painting process and determine her compositions, Capanna watches these digitized reels and races to paint what she sees. Within each canvas, shifting views glimpsed through car windows and camera lenses are condensed into the picture plane, allowing the long road, seasonal changes, wide-ranging experiences, and myriad places to collapse into a single image. This marks Capanna's third exhibition with the gallery.
Ralph Pugay: ShangriLIEF
November 8—December 20, 2025
Ralph Pugay (b. 1983, Cavite, Philippines; lives and works in Portland, OR) returns to Adams and Ollman with ShangriLIEF, an immersive drawing installation that transforms the gallery walls into a constellation of imagined makeshift temples. Painted directly onto the walls, large-scale backdrops evoke fractured utopias—part memory, part myth—while layered networks of drawings on paper affixed to the walls pulse with tender absurdity. Pugay's practice—rooted in culturally hybridized, queer, and internet-native perspectives—collapses popular phenomena, historical trauma, and mundane observation into nonlinear fables.