Adams’ garment art floats like gleaming, disembodied spirits
Sunday, April 01, 2014
Birmingham News, AL
PRIMA MATERIA. Recent Works by Katherine Adams. Tina Newton Gallery. Through April 30.
The collage/photograph prints by Katherine Adams are delightful, free-wheeling and sophisticated. She has developed a technique that manipulates photographs from a fixed state to a viscous one, enabling her to push and pull the colors into fragmentary abstractions. These newly created images float over a surface like spirit forces of colorful plasma, suggesting asymmetric Rorschach test patterns
In a group of works titled “Couturier Dreams,” Adams suggests women’s garments, from underwear to outer wear. These fabric-like wisps float and flow like diaphanous garments in swirling water. Disembodied spirits that shift and shimmer into a series of shapes, they are like small clouds on a windy day.
Adams’ technical facility is awesome, but in the final analysis it is her eye that gives these elegant works their panache.
There is information available that gives a general description of her technique of transferring slide transparencies onto Polaroid film and then onto paper.
RECENT WORKS BY ROBERT BEAN. Hawthorne Gallery. Through April 7.
Somber, muted landscapes with solitary images create the effect of time in transition. These are ruminations that capture a powerful feeling of isolation.
“No Direction Home” presents a young man with a suitcase facing a horizon line. One third of the painting is a black vertical slab with phases of the moon fixed like buttons in an elevator. The mood of this and other works in the show have a visual quality found in the prose of John Steinbeck – a sense of wandering, looking and not belonging.
A dream-like quality permeates the fanciful “Persephone,” which shows a somnolent nude woman curled in a fetal position. A red, outlined, cocoon-like underground oval with a broken pomegranate is on the ground. Above ground is fresh green grass, a single tree in full leaf and a rather dusty pink sky.
“Sea of Tranquility” juxtaposes a pensive man sitting at one end of a rubber raft and a passive tiger lying at the other. It is a reflective comment on balance sustained by absolute calm. In “Imitation of Reality,” a young man wears a rabbit mask while a rabbit crouches on the ground in front of him. The painting titled “Look” presents a man in a chair on a deserted lawn that seems to be suspended over dark space. He is reading Look magazine, which covers his face, while a huge single boulder floats over his head.
Elements of surrealism, particularly the work of Rene Magritte, are obvious influences in Bean’s work. In “Occulus,” a young man with his back to the viewer looks up at a red balloon that floats to a large white oval. Many of Bean’s works involve catalytic figures turned away from the spectator, a device that encourages looking at what is happening in the painting.
James R. Nelson is visual arts critic for the Birmingham News.
