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Juli Adams
November 15, 2008
More About the Artist:
Juli Adams
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For Immediate Release:
Juli Adams Illuminates the Dreamy Spaces In Between
Juli Adams has aptly titled her newest show of paintings and drawings, Night in the Cobweb Day: Tales of the Spaces in Between. The exhibit has been on display at Astoria's RiverSea Gallery since November 9, and the artist reception will be held during Arts Night Out on Saturday, November 15, from 5 to 9 p.m. The public is invited to meet the artist, and indulge in art, music and refreshments during this event. The artwork will remain on view through December 2.
As the title of the show suggests, much of the work by this Seattle area artist belies the predictable spaces of our more common expectations, where a mysterious visage is neither portraiture nor caricature, where exaggerated, pouting eyes suggest an interior world, but one cloaked in the beauty of characters the artist clearly has compassion for.
"I don't believe in artist's block. Working, for me, is a process. It is a relationship with myself. It is always growing, giving, and taking. It demands that I pay attention to myself and the world," says Adams.
Adams' style contrasts flat, architectural draftsmanship with life-like sculpted forms that tempt with juicy bites of sunny summers, lost thoughts, and head-in-the-clouds dreaminess.
The people and creatures that inhabit Adams' world are soft and time-worn, something to cherish, and hold tight; characters so affectionately rendered, they beckon like a long-lost teddy bear or a favorite rocking chair.
If there is an apex to Adams' surrealism, it is in the eyes, where much of the detail and focus of these works takes shape, a point of fixed precision, amid an emotional sea of strange forces and inner complexities.
"The face and the eyes are the mask that exists between the outer reality and the inner reality," says Adams.
If one hopes to explore this avenue between the internal and external, these inscrutable, bewitching portals are so clearly the place to start.
And if Adams' realer than real approach didn't already grab you, she has recently begun working mostly in oils in order to push the illusions of volume even further.
Adams is clearly inspired by the architecture of the human body, the mysteries of the human drama and the unbound flight of the imagination, but if any personality serves as her primary muse, it is likely her own.
"When I paint, each painting is individually of that moment," says Adams. "It comes from these indefinable places that happen in the imagination."
Adams takes the reality we know, and tweaks it. The sleek features of a dark-haired nymph become even sharper. The gangly limbs of a lithe figure are stretched to express what is integral to our ideas of beauty and balance.
But Adams has not only created a successful amalgamation of abstraction, realism, and figure study, she has thrown in a unique sort of storytelling.
Deliberately, Adams' work forces us to question our own sense of what is real and what is false. What is the subject's vulnerability, and what is our own? Adams' work lures with hints and mysteries without ever painting into a corner the plights and outcomes of these varied scenarios.
In many ways, Adams extends an invitation. The finished piece is the beginning. The real adventure emerges within the expectations and imagination of the viewer, when personal experience coalesces with the tale on the canvas.
"It's not a story, so much as a moment in time," explains Adams, "something connected to the moment before, and the moment after."
As long as these paintings continue to emerge, Adams will continue to illuminate these often ineffable spaces in between.
"My paintings are a response to understanding those dimmer areas. That's what the title of the show means," says Adams, "the place where you see everything that's connected."
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