YURA ADAMS

WARM, DARK AND ROARING

October 27 - December 17, 2022

Olympia is pleased to present Warm, Dark, and Roaring, a solo exhibition of experimentations in painting and installation by Yura Adams. An observer and taxonomic interpreter of the Williams River and greater Western Massachusetts landscape, Adams is motivated by phenomena observed in nature.

Science describes from outside, poetry describes from inside; science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what is revealed. Adams believes that we need the language of both to save us from political misdirection that fails to inform our relationship to our environment and surroundings. 

Adams uses immediate experiences to create one-to-one relationships with the subject. Sylvan ridges, weather patterns, and birds descending offer a wellpool of material. Nature printing and sound charts are distilled into organic silhouettes balanced by the artists’ own system of mark-making and geometric forms that temper the rhythm of the work.

Titles, loved or hated by artists, are ordinarily used to provide undertones of inside understanding. Adams opens doors with her titles, using them to provide clarity into specific experiences of viewing. Step Into My Cloud and Angelica are works whose titles provide clues to her indefatigable curiosity and questioning.

Her sense of place is centered by the location of her studio – in open fields bordered by two rivers. In her practice, her paintings translate a vision of what she has seen there. Yura Adams is a painter who sees a world drawn from the poetry of nature.

Yura Adams was recently presented at NADA New York Art Fair by Olympia, May 2022, and exhibited at LABspace, Hillsdale, New York, August-September, 2022. Adams has an extensive exhibition record throughout the Hudson Valley with many shows with John Davis Gallery of Hudson, New York and other venues including Opalka Gallery in Albany, New York.

This summer she was awarded a grant from the Peter S Reed Foundation and has also received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Berkshire Taconic Foundation, New York Decentralization, and National Endowment for the Arts. Adams was selected for the New York Foundation of the Arts Mark Program and for the 2021 Drawing Center Viewing Program. She currently lives and works in Western Massachusetts.