Carris Adams: Signs All Kind

Goldfinch is proud to present our third solo exhibition with Carris Adams, Signs All Kinds. Taking the form of a dramatic, gallery-spanning installation of approximately 50 black and white, enamel works on Dura-lar, Adams' presentation continues her longstanding exploration of language, space, visibility and legibility through a painter's lens. For this exhibition, Adams shares an ongoing body of work begun in 2020, during the earliest phases of Covid lockdown, that was never explicitly intended for exhibition. Instead, these paintings have  served as a personal collection and archive consisting of isolated words that, as the artist notes, are "meant to inspire, to reference, to research, to push, to pull. Some will transition into paintings, drawings, titles, sculptures, fantasies of works that are too expensive to produce, prints and installations."

Adams will combine and layer these individual pieces into ephemeral formations that play with the roles of connotation and denotation in speech acts as well as with the contingency of language itself. In some moments, words or phrases emerge with singular clarity; in others, they are layered and juxtaposed beyond decipherability. Because this  configuration of works will only ever exist in this particular form once, the installation itself may be considered as  a performative speech act on Adams' part, wherein the artist shows--through her active process of choosing, combining, assembling and re-assembling, blurring and foregrounding text -- that language is a  system that exists both outside and within us, structuring our relationship to culture, nature and ourselves in sometimes legible, but often times illegible ways.