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Strange Days Indeed at Adjacent To Life

Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Strange Days Indeed by Tracy Thomson.

Marisa Malone contributes the exhibition essay:

In Tracy Thomson’s latest paintings we see a shift further into abstraction, the interior space often present in her work is breaking down even more. There are suggestions of walls from the straight lines that cut across an otherwise fluid and layered background. Yet these walls are transparent, unable to fully contain or mark a solid distinction between spaces. There is a juxtaposition of boundaries: inside vs outside, the built environment vs wilderness, containment vs irrepressible growth.

These paintings emerge from an intuitive practice that mirrors nature’s building and restructuring of itself. Working with mixed media on wood panels, Thomson starts by painting pieces of cut paper, then plays with their arrangement seeking interesting contrasts, textures, and shapes. There is a lot of permission in her process, an allowance of happenstance and spontaneity. “I call them reconstructed paintings,” she explains, “[the process] can feel like the world rebuilding itself, no urban planning, just life regenerating wherever it can.” Even with such immediate aesthetic decisions, we can see her work in conversation with painters such as Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka.

Thomson imagines future landscapes with a mix of a post-apocalyptic vision and a persistent hopefulness, “I always think that organics will regenerate in any environment, providing a continuum of life, though it will look quite different with unfamiliar beings and new flora and fauna.” Her work unearths possibilities of what this new scenery might look like. Our experience of a landscape rapidly changing in ways we have yet to understand is a recurring tension for Thomson.

Long interested in the unseen elements that shape us and our environment, this series probes the underside of rocks, logs, the psyche, culture, and myths; “I’ve always been fascinated by what is hidden beneath, the underbelly in both nature and human nature… the unseen liminal space in the night.” Her work speaks to the messy, layered, symbolic elements of creation, destruction, and adaptation. The collaged paper, thick coats of paint, embedded metallics, and found imagery, all combine to create a unique and uncanny world.

- Marisa Malone

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Marisa Malone grew up in the Sierra foothills of Nevada. She studied writing and literature at The Evergreen State College and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing has been published in BlazeVox Journal and Selfish Magazine, along with two self-published poetry chapbooks.

Strange Days Indeed is on view through May 3, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Saturday, April 6, 7:00 - 9:00.

Groves: happier_#206

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Groves: shrugging_#204

March's Acrylic Palettes

Groves: geese_#61

Groves: quoting_#60

Groves: goldskinned_#59

Groves: exchange_#58

Groves: stock_#57

Groves: wanderers_#56

Groves: sinned_#55

Groves: sells_#54

Groves: vision_#53

Groves: wide_#52

Groves: harlot's_#51

Groves: sunbeam_#50

Groves: broad_#49

Groves: destruction_#48

Groves: already_#47

Groves: merchants_#46

Car Show at Adjacent To Life

Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents Car Show by Cooper Ronan.

@c0000000000per's statement:

As one could probably gather, I’ve become a bit obsessed with the cars that sit on the streets of New York City. Battered and war-torn from wild drivers, winter weather, street sweepers etc., these cars screech loud and proud, puttering along, only to potentially break down the next avenue over.

My appreciation of cars started at an early age with the usual Scholastic book fair poster on my wall and watching BBC’s Top Gear. Ironically, it was the repetitive walks I would take, in whatever neighborhood I lived in at the time, that I found myself daydreaming of these cars. Everywhere I looked, they taunted me with their roadside freedom. Scratched, crashed, dented, rusted over and in need of repair, all waiting in single file lines along every block. It doesn't make sense really, in a city so walkable, with public transportation built into the infrastructure, and “No fucking spots anywhere!” – Why would anyone have a car in this city? What drives us to hold on to these pieces of highly manufactured garbage, expensive repair after expensive repair?

It's obvious really, they're icons. Symbols of a limitless and immediate reality, of dreams realized or lost, of extra space held in a city that can feel so small. Above all, there’s hope welded into their chassis. They represent us as people. We slap stickers on the back bumpers, boasting our political beliefs, brands we like, or silly jokes we think will align with someone behind us. We raise them up, drop them low, add suspension, tint the windows; they’re our personalized motor companions. Their iconography is nostalgic, they remind us of the dreams we once had when we held child-like bewilderment for toy cars, now actualized as functional motor vehicles.

Car Show is a return to that boyhood glimmer in my eyes. It grapples with my simple interest in cars and how that’s informed an entire construct in my life, such as notions of masculinity. It’s a car-centric coming of age, distracted and fixated on aesthetics while crossing the road from boyhood to manhood. It is both an escape and acceptance – so utterly boy, it hurts. Beyond all, it is a love letter to these icons and my younger, present, and future self’s infatuation with them.

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Car Show is on view through April 5, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Saturday, March 9, 7:00 - 9:00.

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February's Acrylic Palettes

Groves: gabbles_#196

Groves: gemmed_#195

Groves: standing_#45

Groves: seen_#44

Groves: strength_#43

Groves: vital_#42

Groves: gather_#41

Groves: whenever_#40

Groves: decay_#39

Groves: nation's_#38

Groves: finance_#37

Groves: places_#36

Groves: highest_#35

Groves: mark_#34

pepi do it

Tinsquo's curatorial project, Adjacent To Life, presents pepi do it by Pepi G. Friedman.

Caregivers take photographs of children, especially when they are young. But what does a child see? The works on display here, compositions “made” and images “taken” by an infant, conjure classic debates about meaning and signification in photography. Can photos index the will of an author whose thought, prior to speech, is largely instrumental? In the case of an artist only partially initiated into any community of language and representation, it would seem impossible to glean intentions from photographic effects.

Audiences often ponder what exactly an artist meant to convey, but the author’s subjectivity operates here on a different plane. With these photos we encounter intention not in the symbolic language of composition, but in the manipulation of a device, in the claim to a tool in the representational world of adults. Pepi seized our phones with purpose (we fretted; should she be engaging with technology so young?). This exhibit recognizes her declaration: “I am here. I am part of this community, even if I have not yet mastered its languages.”

With these interventions, Pepi interrupts our habitual documentation of her as a passive object of affection. She pulls the brakes on the 24/7 recording of her life. Some photographs seem to carve out significance from the morass of everyday experience. Others render — by accident, surely? — pleasing abstract forms. Altogether, they provide an occasion for you, the viewer, to recall memories, to make connections, to invent stories, and to engage in your own subjective experience.

- Andrew Anastasi and Rose Friedman

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pepi do it is on view through March 8, 2024 at the Adjacent To Life gallery housed in Ninth Street Espresso (341 E. 10th Street at Ave B, New York City). Opening reception: Saturday, February 10, 7:00 - 9:00.

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January's Acrylic Palettes

Groves: try_#27

Groves: surrounded_#26

Groves: influence_#25