Solo Exhibition at Luminary Center for the Arts

[/caption] Solo project of site-specific painting at the Luminary Center for the Arts. On Friday, February 4th from 6-9pm, Lauren Frances Adams will open The Nymph’s Reply, a painting-based installation that combines Elizabethan decorative tropes and John White’s watercolors of native Algonquin Indians as a vehicle for exploring American post-colonialism. An artist talk will be held on March 11. Finding inspiration in Sir Walter Raleigh’s pastoral poem of the same title, the installation is simultaneously visually seductive and chaotic, its aesthetic approachability belying the pedantic critique embedded within the wall paintings. The appropriated references are rendered by hand in the large-scale paintings, creating a surreal juxtaposition of previously disparate elements united by the artist’s process. The result is a barrage of collaged forms confronting the viewer with a dense symbolic field of multiple historical timelines and references, in an attempt to make sense of conflicting colonial narratives. Lauren Frances Adams currently teaches painting in the BFA program and the interdisciplinary MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis. She has exhibited at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte; the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; an ex-Turkish bathhouse in Belgrade, Serbia; Royal NoneSuch Gallery in Oakland, California, and CUE Art Foundation in Chelsea, New York. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and recently completed a residency at the Cite in Paris, France, July and August 2010. She is also a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award. She has an upcoming solo project at Conner Contemporary in Washington, DC.]]>