LOS ANGELES, CA.- Garis & Hahn presents A Piebald Era, marking Downtown Los Angeles-based painter Lisa Adams's debut solo show with the gallery. The exhibition will open on January 12 and remain on view through February 16, 2019.
Occupying the liminal space between abstraction and representation, the imaginary and the real, Adams's highly original paintings depict scenes which lie at the intersection where nature meets the brutality of the human-made, as filtered through a uniquely otherworldly prism. Derived from photographs and experiences as well as her personal imaginings, Adams's idiosyncratic paintings are an admixture of fact and fantasy, amalgamated fragments manifesting in a disjointed whole, a skewed world that is seemingly falling apart.
Exploring the contradictions borne from the dichotomy between natural and urban environments, Adams fuses the two worlds into a new disturbing surreality. Conjuring dystopian visions which serve as visual representations of a society bereft of reason, Adams's fictitious worlds reference actual locations--the Los Angeles River, Griffith Park, the Salton Sea--recognizable yet distorted, altered in a way that is purposefully misleading. Simultaneously merging realistic and abstracted elements into the same picture plane, nothing is quite as it appears. In her eccentric, improbable universe, a pink porpoise is trapped in a carousel, a distressed fox lives in a cardboard shelter, a solitary tree house stands forlornly abandoned.
Neglected and overgrown and covered in graffiti, Adams's one-of-a-kind re-imaginings are mash ups of incongruity--there remains a glimpse of beauty in her prophetic and post-apocalyptic compositions, hope amidst the despair. Manifest of a world which no longer makes sense, Adams's realistic yet abstracted paintings proffer more questions than answers, leaving viewers to interpret a fantastical landscape, an imagined future at once of and not of this world.
Lisa Adams currently lives and works in downtown Los Angeles, California. She has a B.A. from Scripps College in Claremont, California and an M.F.A. from the Claremont Graduate University.
Her work has been exhibited in art fairs and galleries throughout the United States and abroad including PULSE Miami, Miami Project, World Design City, Gifu Prefecture, Japan and the Sandberg Institute in Hoorn, Holland. Adams is in the public collections of the Eli Broad Corporate Collection, the Edward Albee Foundation, the San Jose Museum of Art, USC Fisher Museum of Art, the Laguna Museum of Art and the Long Beach Museum of Art among others. Her public art commissions include the Chatsworth Orange Line Metro Station, Fire Station No. 64 in the Watts district of South Los Angeles, the West Valley Branch Library in Reseda and she was commissioned by BMW of North America to paint an ArtCar as the centerpiece of BMWs sponsorship for the ART/LA Art Fair. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Fulbright Professional Scholar Award, a Brody Arts Fund Fellowship and an ARC Grant.