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Joy Feasley, Lee M. Hale & Maya Vivas


  • Adams and Ollman Portland, OR (map)

Adams and Ollman is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring painting and sculpture by Joy Feasley, Lee M. Hale, Maya Vivas. Isolating or distilling distinct elements from the natural world, each artist envisions the landscape through an inventive and singular lens. All have worked with a sharp focus on forms and composition over many years and their resulting works are united formally through rich organic shapes and a powerful energy. The exhibition will open with a reception at the gallery on Saturday, August 7 and be on view through September 4.

Joy Feasley’s expansive universe is undergirded by a geometry that expands and replicates infinitely. Depicted throughout her small-scale paintings is a theory or visualization of the indeterminable, something that is indebted to a spirituality and a curiosity that pulls from direct observation of the natural world, historic explanations of natural phenomenon, Shaker aesthetics and American Transcendentalist ideas.

Lee M. Hale, a jewelry designer by trade, has been using the form of the thorn in her work for nearly forty years–attracted to the simple shape that, upon close observation, has great variation. Lee casts her free-standing or isolated thorns in bronze, emphasizing their protective role, potential for danger and their great beauty.

Maya Vivas’ carefully constructed ceramic and stainless steel forms explore the notion of becoming and an evolution that is self-determined. Undulating lines, folds, and curves define the surfaces of sculptures that resemble seed pods, ready to birth a futuristic diasporic body memory. Vivas’ ceramics are pierced, signaling queerness as well as a state of flux in dialogue with the history and spirit of speculative fiction. The works are non-linear, wild seeds that do not adhere to a birth to death trajectory, but instead embody a time that is malleable and shifting, while underscoring a synergy between nature and fiction.

Earlier Event: August 7
Kelda Van Patten, Nature Inside