Adams’ garment art floats like gleaming, disembodied spirits
\nSunday, April 01, 2014
\nBirmingham News, AL
\nPRIMA MATERIA. Recent Works by Katherine Adams. Tina Newton Gallery. Through April 30.<\/p>\n
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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<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Adams’ technical facility is awesome, but in the final analysis it is her eye that gives these elegant works their panache.<\/p>\n
There is information available that gives a general description of her technique of transferring slide transparencies onto Polaroid film and then onto paper.<\/p>\n
RECENT WORKS BY ROBERT BEAN. Hawthorne Gallery. Through April 7.<\/p>\n
Somber, muted landscapes with solitary images create the effect of time in transition. These are ruminations that capture a powerful feeling of isolation.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
James R. Nelson is visual arts critic for the Birmingham News.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n