Lisa Adams' new oil-on-panel paintings depict various flora and fauna of the natural world, often adding a discomfiting intrusion like a mechanical design, urban remnant or painterly abstraction into the picture. Les Jardins Pendus displays a purple flower hanging upside down from its viney stalk, while the stalk itself forms a ring of nearly perfect circles in the center of the image. Smaller tendrils from each circle wrap around each other, while the widest vine curves against the formation of the circle and tapers to a point, dissolving into green drips toward the bottom of the panel. Such simple imagery—but the combination of crawling vines, unnatural growth patterns and semi-magical effects produces an eerie ambience.

That effect is more overt when her vines become thorny and black, as in We Destroyed The Things We Loved, in which they hang down in a dense interlacing pattern across the top of a glacial scene. The sky is a slightly toxic greenish yellow, and the center of the painting has been overcome by interfering graffiti declaring: ALBEDO. Albedo is a complex form of light reflectivity related to radiation, but regardless of whether one understands the term, it is clear that, in Adams’ work, the earth’s substances are in peril. Those substances extend to the animal kingdom in A Bird for Zosimus and Prelapsarian Dream, two paintings that evoke the form of portraiture more than anything else, except that the head and neck portrayed in each instance is a bird’s. These works suggest the fusion of an Audubon Society entry and a high school yearbook photo, but without any anthropomorphism. The expressions on the bird’s faces interrogate the viewer precisely because they don’t adopt any human expressions: their distant gazes reach around our desire to engage with them. An especially odd detail on Prelapsarian Dream is a thin, light blue line that begins at the bird’s beak and plunges straight down, breaking occasionally, to the bottom of the image. Like Barnett Newman’s stripe, it seems to indicate a rupture both from and into another world. Adams’ work fosters deep absorption and lingering unease.

“A Bird for Zosimus,” 2008 Lisa Adams oil on panel 30" x 24"
Photo: courtesy of Lawrence Asher Gallery