19 Jul 2018

Unturned: Shao Yuan Zhang & Fafnir Adamites

Fountain Street Gallery

Reviewed by Heather Kapplow

What ties "Unturned" together is a shared color palette and the gestures captured by each artist - gestures frozen not because motion has ceased, but because they're moving, always, past the moment of representation.

Zhang's wild (but trained) horses seem symbolic, like gods, and majestic down to the individual drips of paint. The single abstraction in the show, Elemental, feels representational. It's like a peek through a microscope at the DNA of what's happening in each of the other works. It leaves one wanting more, and bigger.

Adamites is doing something much smaller, and maybe more plodding in the endearing sense of the word. Perhaps because the works are 3D, the actions expressed by repetition and variation more closely work the themes. Where Zhang is loose, Adamites is tight, quickly gathering and tracking information even as it slips through her fingers.

The title of the show is mysterious, but inquiry reveals that it's about resisting the force of external pressures.