I Was A Wall, And My Breasts Were Like Fortress Towers: Math Bass, Julie Bena, Ellen Lesperance, Sarah Peters, Amy Pleasant, Christina Ramberg, Ana Roldan, and Alice Tippit

I Was A Wall, And My Breasts Were Like Fortress Towers: Math Bass, Julie Bena, Ellen Lesperance, Sarah Peters, Amy Pleasant, Christina Ramberg, Ana Roldan, and Alice Tippit
June 9–July 8, 2017

Adams and Ollman is pleased to present I Was A Wall, And My Breasts Were Like Fortress Towers and Her Eyes Are Like Doves Beside Streams of Water, two exhibitions featuring painting, drawing, text and sculpture which represent or reference the body, in parts, as code, sign or symbol.

The exhibitions respond to the metaphors of "blason anatomique," a 16th century poetic device wherein the female body is dissected into fragments. In these anatomical love poems, eyes, breasts, lips, thighs are isolated and glorified; as various parts of a woman's body are desired, the whole is ordered, divided and subsequently, ruled.

Like the "blason anatomique," the artists included in these exhibitions often focus only on a fragment–a head, torso, or finger. However, in so doing, the artists do not objectify or catalogue, but rather construct a new monument or totem, one which reimagines the figure's erotic, surreal, contentious, and formidable potentialities. Using a combination of oppositional, defiant and hybrid forms and employing abstraction, among other devices, these artists approach the subject through the lens of history, language, design, science fiction, craft and architecture to take over the blason tradition and reclaim a space for the body, one that is contemporary, subjective and subversive.