LOS ANGELES, CA.- Established L.A. artist and muralist Erin Adams announced the opening of the city’s newest artist-run gallery on Mid City’s vibrant West Pico Boulevard. In this diverse neighborhood of major museums but few galleries or studios, Brainworks Gallery is a showcase for emerging artists, conversation, and a truly independent perspective on the artistic voice in today’s world.

The gallery opened January 7 with a show by Thomas Adams titled The Southern California Suburb Project, Today, Brainworks Gallery presents a talented artist with a deep work ethic and uncompromising point of view. The mixed media exhibition is a continuation of Thomas Adams’ figurative and graphic discussion of personal and generational history marked by a looming inarticulate sense of melancholy, grace, failure, and missed fruition.

Previous work depicted common relics of a seventies suburban childhood: tricycles, a set of Jacks, a hand sewn toy rabbit floating in a deserted imagining of pastel homes and skies. This collection departs. The landscapes are heavy and saturated with color but there is a familiarity about them: a dark cool fog off the pacific, a dense green ally wall, intense color that defines omnipresent advertisements. Loneliness is replaced by more defined presences in this new work. Human figures are more directly threatened. A distant oil rig, a dominating lottery stand, and endless rolling houses are encroaching on figure and viewer. The passage of time has become crystalized by long panels of morphing shapes.

The artist does not attempt to combat, or even resist these pressures. He presents them as plain and as serious as they are, and accepts them. The work is the story of a man and a class that is wrought with fatigue. Home has become too familiar. The artist is straining to see and remain critical of images that entered second nature decades ago.

Thomas Adams has been a working mural artist in Southern California for 25 years; his work shows his deep roots both in his use of color and theme.

With the opening of this gallery, Erin Adams invites a more lively dialogue between artists and the city about what it means to have a voice and how we use it. Shows will feature both emerging and established artists whose work has a strong point of view. As an artist-run gallery, Brainworks Gallery intends to function as a place to meet new voices that are curated but unconstrained by market forces.

Erin is a graduate of Otis College and has been well known for her work in art direction and mural creation under the Brainworks name for the past 30 years.