Justin Lincoln

Just came from the Gerald Donato opening and saw artist Justin Lincoln... he is curating free monthly video screenings at ADA, with the first one tomorrow (Saturday) night, 8pm -

"William E. Jones' feature-length documentary Is It Really So Strange?An intimate look at the lives of Morrissey fans in Los Angeles."

BRUCE HAINLEY on WILLIAM E. JONES at ARTFORUM

PS - go see Gerry Donato's show!! i will try to get back to it tomorrow afternoon.

Jered Sprecher

Jered Sprecher is showing at ADA this month. I like his paintings.... feeling kind of brain dead at the moment, nothing to say more than that. Somebody say something smart in the comments, smart-ass is fine too.

He's GOOD!

Chris Norris

Chris Norris paintings, wrapped up in bubble wrap. There was a special "salon showing" at someone's house for these on Saturday night... next stop, Scope Miami.

Chris was included in Amy Hauft's Relativity, and is also the MAIN MAN of Pollak Prize winning art team FEAST (okay, he is the only man of FEAST).


Raaarghh!!! Here comes my boner!!!


This is not a Chris Norris, this is a coffee shop sign. Ha ha, got you.


I modeled for this one.

Okay, that is all the boner for now.

Daniel Davidson

Daniel Davidson had a PICTURE BOOTH at ADA on Friday... five dollars to get in the booth and have your picture drawn. This kid coming out didn't get his portrait done.. he just sat down and put some nickels in. I don't think he "got it".


Here is a guy with his portrait. Sort of looks like a Dickens character in the portrait, like he is about to give Oliver Twist a beating.


Inside you sat on a stool and looked at a square mirror, under bright lights, with square light reflections in your eyes. It was hard to stare straight ahead at the mirror and pose for a portrait, knowing that it was a two-way mirror with Daniel Davidson sitting on the other side staring back, drawing your picture.


The other side of the booth... that is Daniel Davidson's entrance.


This was so funny, and cruel. There is a sign over a box, some pencils, and a pile of index cards... inviting you to write down your comments and criticisms and put them in the box. I watched this woman spend some time writing stuff and carefully drawing something and then putting it in the box... and then it got shredded and came out in strips from the bottom, falling to the floor. This picture is taken just as the card has gone in and the strips are coming out.

It happened over and over, John kept kicking away the shredded paper strips so nobody would catch on.

RELATED: another artist's picture booth (scroll down) .

Interview with ADA Gallery's John Pollard at Scope London

Here's a video interview with ADA Gallery's John Pollard at Scope London. Getting into these fairs had been a big goal of his... I think he took work by Kate Woodliff, the Spahr Brothers, Daniel Davidson, Eric Sall, A.J. Liberto, Bruce Wilhelm, Casey Jex Smith, Charles Yuen, Tricia Keightley... others.


Here is John scoping out Scope Miami last year... trying to figure out how to get in.

UPDATE: That video has now had more "views" than any of the other London art goings-ons videos (Frieze, Scope, etc.) on that site....

Michael Mewborn

Very much liked the Michael Mewborn paintings at ADA Gallery. The piece above is the one that I first stared at from outside, through the window, trying to get. Those aren't reflections on the painting, it isn't warped at all, there is no black framing... it is all just paint.


Here is a detail of the painting above, showing all the grays and the black border.

Everything at the gallery is recent work made after a thirty-year break from painting. Colors and shapes are often (always?) chosen randomly, using some kind of random number generator on the computer.


All of the other paintings are bright and colorful.

I was thinking of Stephen Westfall and Edna Andrade, two artists whose work I like A LOT.


The lines are all wobbly and shaky.. everything is painted by hand.. no tape.


Computer aided paintings.. but not really. Hard edge paintings... but not really.


I asked another artist what he thought and he said he wasn't into them because he doesn't like minimalism.. are these minimalism? So much color and busyness? Op-art, okay. I pressed him and he said that he meant he "likes work that is more visually complex". I'm so confused! What??


Usually don't like to see signatures on the front like this, but with these paintings... YES! Look at the signature in the little white box of the first image posted.. so cute!

Sandra Luckett

Sandra Luckett's magical little landscape on a turntable; it spins around. The inside cover has a reflective gold foil, small mirror balls are suspended above (you can see their shadows on the wall). The goal was to create a shimmering aurora borealis on the wall, which she does.

This is part of her show at ADA, closing soon.

Bruce Wilhelm

Bruce Wilhelm is showing new work at ADA Gallery through May 27.


This one is very nice. The Japanese looking pine tree is what first caught my attention, and later I noticed the ghostly robed figure in the reeds on the left, and the ghost shadow shape in the foreground. I love my little ghost house painting he did... and of course everything Japanese pine trees is good.


This one is so much like Hasegawa Tohaku's famous screens, and seems so different for Bruce. Where is the absurdity? Where are the characters? This is one of two restrained forest scenes in the show, the other doesn't have the strong Japanese feel. I like this one a lot.


Hasegawa Tohaku. I'm guessing Bruce must have looked at this, the similarities are so strong. It is interesting to see Bruce's probable reinterpretation so soon after Chris Ashley's posting of our own Tao-Chi mountain re-dos.


This one is closer to what we expect from Bruce. I was looking at Breugel today was reminded of Bruce and his work. The bare trees, the palette, odd figures outside engaged in the everday alongside the unfamiliar. Something Breugel about Bruce's work, for me.

Bruce is one of the artists representing ADA at the Affordable Art Fair and Scope-Hamptons, the bastard.

Navid Nuur

Navid Nuur is showing a tight collection of polaroids at ADA Gallery, part of a show curated by artists Derek Cote and John Henry Blatter, from the pages of their Daily Constitutional.

These twenty-eight polaroids are propped on tiny nails, and all show the same corner of what is probably the artist's studio, in The Netherlands. The placement of the camera doesn't change, so the lines of the floor and walls remain fixed within the white-bordered grid of photos. Also fixed are some of the elements within each photo, most prominently what looks like an up-ended metal table or shelf thing; the black lines of this thing are the internal skeleton of each picture. The other elements in the corner, mostly unrecognizable industrial stuff, are rearranged in each photo: stacked on the floor, leaning against the wall or shelf-thing, on top or below or within. Like twenty-eight little temporary sculptures. One of the elements is a flourescent light fixture, so the light of each photo is a bit different with the lights on or off, or leaning against the wall or shining on the corner. The center grouping of photos glows green, with the light reflecting off something green in the corner and the rest of the lights in the room turned off.

I love the scale of this piece, it feels like a miniature, like a dollhouse. A few of the photos include more recognizable objects - a skateboard, a broom - which shift the reading and sense of scale.

Very nice.

Ryan Mulligan is also in this show with some funny and paranoid drawings, sketches of homes turned fortresses, with lists and notes explaining the new protective features. Number two on the check-list for Extreme Compound Modification is "establish fail-safe plan". Other notes-to-self include "store extra lumber in cut and debarked form" and "maintain morale at all costs".

These made me think of Ryan's room from his Anderson Gallery show last year. I think he is in a show at Art Space opening soon?

Rachel Hayes

Rachel Hayes is showing some GOOD STUFF at ADA Gallery -


Polka Dot Mystery Box - What is it??? I don't know, it is a mystery. This backpack-bag is open on the bottom, but that's okay because on the moon there is zero gravity.


detail, looking inside at the dots.


Blasts - this photo is from an installation at the Fahrenheit Gallery in Kansas City, but she's got some blasts up at ADA. They are like superhero things to me; graphic, energetic, colorful and plastic - like Batman Pows! and Kracks! and reminiscent of the insignia on some of the characters: Superman's S, Flash's lightning bolt, The Riddler's question mark.

Also like the (stars part of the) flag or a shot-up building. That's an interesting combination - the American flag, cartoon heroism, and violence.


Soft Ice - a school of giant shower-caps or jellyfish, they are fixed on the wall but give the impression of being ready to move, ready to breathe. Round but floppy.

That's sculptor Tim Devoe looking at them, he's good too.


Not sure what this plastic layered picnic tarp is called, but isn't it nice? Anni and Josef Albers' space station honeymoon quilt. I stole this last photo from Warren Craghead's drawer.

This is the same Rachel Hayes that made the excellent looking Sculpture Center installation. She makes big installation things and can do good smaller stuff like what she has at ADA. I am not into her "drawings" at all - small works on paper with collage - but love almost everything else. She must be super busy right now; she's got this show up and is included in 1708 Gallery's upcoming Pulse show, and will also have her graduating thesis exhibition very soon (she is a VCU MFA).

Rachel received one of the four 2005-2006 Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowships in Sculpture, along with Danielle Riede. Panelists were Mark E. Brown, David Furchgott, and Greg Henry.

Tricia Keightley

Tricia Keightley is one of the artists exhibiting at ADA. Very into the precision and colors, the tinted backgrounds. John said these paintings are like what Jules Verne might have imagined paintings of the future to be like.


They are like illustrations of machines from the castle laboratory. Maybe you can find this making cotton-candy at a Renaissance fair.


Gothic. Stained glass.

more later...

Kirsten Kindler

One of Kirsten Kindler's wall hangings at ADA Gallery. All of her pieces in this show are assembled from cut-outs of magazine photographs, I think mostly advertisements; it isn't possible to identify the subjects of the original photos. I visited her studio once and she had a row of boxes on her worktable filled with shapes, separated by color. Lots of blues, greens, and darks.

This piece is not touching the wall, it's suspended at the top and casting shadows. I'm not sure if, with a piece like this, she knows what she is making from the start and cuts the shapes accordingly, or if she assembles something unplanned from the shapes she has cut. Maybe a little of both. This whole thing is taped together with scotch tape; it looks very fancy here but up close you can see all the tape and the scissor cuts that have been repaired with tape. It shimmies in the wind when the door opens and closes.

This is an interesting piece to compare to one of Carson Fox's wall hangings. They look similar, but Carson's piece is made of wire and synthetic hair, and brings to mind specifics like hair memorials and mourning. The interpretations of Kirstin's piece are more open, your idea of what the material might be (iron, cloth) shifts along with various associations (a closed gate, an illuminating chandelier).

The recontextualized glossy magazine source imagery is making me think of Paul Ryan's paintings.


One of three mysterious milky rorschachs. Everything is obfuscated - the original source imagery, whatever it was in the magazine, is cut into this sort of creepy rorschach pattern and then placed under a milky piece of glass.

I see a royal insect face-mask, like a character from my Garden story. No, wait, now I see the female reproductive system.


Many many interlocking rings, cut from magazine photos and taped together. Something bridal beautiful and also pond-scum gross. How does this get moved and stored? Click here to see it much larger and better.


Installation at ADA


Kirsten Kindler is the ONLY PERSON to have bought one of my paintings in 2005!!!

Matthew Fisher and Steven Roebuck at ADA

This small Matthew Fisher painting at ADA Gallery is so strong, from all the way across the gallery it commands your attention. The black is much shinier on the wall, the white horse more muscular. Everything is compacted and compressed, like a tensed muscle.

(you need to click on these paintings to see them best, they seem a little distorted here)


Steven Roebuck's newest paintings were such a surprise! The gloomy black glossiness is gone, replaced by a grainy, sandy, sweet white melancholy. You can't tell from these photos, but the canvas is attached very casually, much looser than the previous paintings, which as I recall often had claustrophobic frames. Or maybe they didn't, and that is just the way they felt - heavy black spaces hard to breathe in.

These are as quiet, still, and dreamy as the Matthew Fisher, but without that painting's ominous charged intensity. Not compacted and compressed, but loose and languid depictions of imagination and discovery.


Steven Roebuck.

P.S. - Kirstin Kindler is also showing at ADA right now, I will do a separate post on her next.

Josh Rickards and more

Josh Rickards, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

more from ADA in September -

Josh Rickards - Josh is showing two full length blocky portraits of nude bearded men, one is called The Nudist and above is King of the Hippies. The King of the Hippies looks so clean and fresh and content - I can feel the breeze. The Nudist is odder, his body is similar to that of the King but his nose is like a Klingon lobster or a cross between that of a proboscis monkey and a mandrill. I feel his resentment, and understand his need to show his clean nude body. Both paintings are bright and crisp and messy and fresh and drippy and sloppy and clean. Very nice balance.

Josh is also showing similar faces painted on baseball bats - and one on a book - which are too Barry McGee on a bottle for me. I don't get it. What's the point? Why bats and books? The Barry McGees make more sense with their allusions to genies and drunks, these seem pointless. His little paintings in radius250 were more interesting.

James Davis - Six or seven glue-gun mandalas.

Sun Tek Chung - Not so interested in the characters or set-ups but he has a good sense of pattern and color, especially in this one. It helps that in my photo two gallery-goers are blocking the mugging distraction of the character.

Theresa Pfarr - She had a show here in August which I completely missed, but many of the paintings are still up in the back.

RELATED: Citizen of the Richmond Artblogopolis with a completely different take, and photos from the opening.

Jeannine Harkleroad

Jeannine Harkleroad at ADA Gallery, originally uploaded by Bromirski.

Jeannine Harkleroad kicks ass. Above is a photo from her performance piece at ADA Gallery earlier this month, Trying To Catch Some Sprinkles On My Donut.

How do I explain this? The very skinny masked baker guy inside the glittery blue V is using pulleys to pull that home-made projector back and forth along a track. Across from him is a green crystal mountain fortress in which Jeannine lay on her back and used a separate pulley system to pull a big creamy dripping icing pink donut back and forth along another track. The baker guy was trying to shoot the sprinkles being projected into Jeannine's donut hole.

Another person dressed as a French maid/Swiss house/domino slowly turned around and around. He had a string tied to his waist and as he turned a miniature house and chalk white finger with a purple nail climbed up a track from the base of Jeannine's crystal fortress to a button near the baker's crotch. The spinning of the domino man wrapped the string around his waist and pulled the finger up the track until it pushed the baker's button, and a bell would sound. Then the domino man would reverse his spin and the finger would slowly go back down the track. The three of them did this nonstop for three hours.

Here is a photo of the whole set-up taken without the performers. When you walked into the gallery you only saw that flat shiny V and weren't aware that there was a skinny guy standing in there until you walked around to the other side and saw his masked face sticking out. It was a weird surprise. The whole thing was full of wonderful weirdness and surprises. I'm nominating Jeannine for a MacArthur. They need to open a file on her.

Here is my post on Jeannine's previous show.

Joel Holmberg

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Joel Holmberg was showing some cool work on the sidewalk in front of ADA Gallery last Friday night; he was just down the street from the fartist. I wish I had an image of one of his small paintings or a still from the accompanying video to share because it's a little hard to explain. He made a color-coded video pie chart based on the Virginia Lottery winning numbers over a period of I don't know how long. Oh, yes! I found a link to the pie chart thing! The paintings he was showing in front of ADA took the colored wedges from specific days - so one painting called something like 7/18/2005 would be an illustration of the pick 6 numbers from that day based on Joel's weird system of megahertz and winning numbers.

Joel is included in a group show at Eyebeam opening tonight (is that a very short show? if so i'm sorry Joel for the late posting), he's into a lot of technical stuff and has a strange sense of humor. I wrote about his Friendster piece here. He is also one of the latest winners of a VMFA Fellowship, of which I am insanely jealous but I won't get into it now.

Two other Richmonders also have NYC shows coming up, Paul Goode (previous post here) and James Davis (previous post here). Paul is included in what looks like an interesting group exhibition at Feigen and James is showing at Rare.

Timothy Michael Martin

This is one of Timothy Michael Martin's pieces in the current show at ADA Gallery. I can't believe the month is almost over and there is so much local art I haven't shared! Maybe I'm getting selfish on my blog. I'll try to spend more time writing about other people's art.

Also included in this ADA show are Buxton Midyette and Chris Norris. I'll go back tomorrow or Wednesday and post something. I think the piece pictured above is my current favorite Mike Martin piece - let's trade!!

Please feel free to share your thoughts or plug/criticize in the comments.

new painting

ADA Gallery owner John Pollard has updated his homepage and it now includes a photo of one of my most recent (2nd-rate? crappy?) paintings. This painting is small, maybe 8" x 11", and a bit brighter in reality. Four hundred bucks and it's yours.

I'm pointing this out because I haven't updated my Inliquid page in a while - all that stuff is from almost a year ago at the latest.

Also - A friend has e-mailed me with some nice thoughts on Susan Jamison's work in response to what I wrote earlier - he/she is too shy to post a comment but I think this is nice and I am placing him/her in the Commenter Protection Program and posting it anyway.

"hey there martin.... I was just reading your blogg, but Im too shy to write anything on it. the birds with the strings is one of my favorites also. the out stretched hand with the strings attached to some of the birds and not others,.... and the broken string on one of the birds---------they all symbolizes the relationships we have in life. those who stay with us. those who break away from us, those we cut away ourselves ( why the sissors are there) and those that come back, even though there are no strings...like heartstrings... no real strings attached.... and there was a string that went off the canvas.... for those relationships that are distant, but who are still, very much attached. there is a lot of depth there, in the artists work, there is also a lot of pain. each of those paintings have a story to them, especially the one you like. you are right about susan, she is a very beautiful person, but she ain't no girlie girl : )"

If you have anything to say about any of the shows you saw on Friday please feel free to leave a comment - don't worry, nobody has to know who you are.

my show at ADA II - TRUE STORY

Last night was the opening of the three-person show I'm included in at ADA Gallery. John's is usually the last gallery to lock it's doors and kick people out and the streets are pretty deserted by that time. A lady approached me in the gallery and asked me to escort her about four blocks to her car - she was a little nervous about walking alone. I don't think she knew I was one of the artists in the show.

So... we're walking down Broad back to her car and she asks me what I thought of the show. I said I thought it was pretty good.

She: I really liked that work by that one guy, those were really good. They were funky.

Me: Yeah? Which guy?

She: The statues. Did he do those paintings too?

Me: Which paintings?

She: The one with the statue in it.

Me: Yes, he did. That's Michael Ferris.

She: I also really liked those paintings by that other artist too. A lot.

Me: Which ones?

She: The white ones with the little birds and sugar.

Me: That's Susan Jamison. Yeah, she's good.

Silence the rest of the way to the car.

my show at ADA

Mentioned in Wednesday's April in Richmond post that I'm included in a three-person show at ADA Gallery. The other two artists in the official "show" are Michael Ferris and Susan Jamison. Gallery owner John Pollard also has an area in the back where work from the most recent shows remains hung so there are a number of pieces by Jason Coates, Steven Little, and Bruce Wilhelm still up to see. This is also where the twelve by twelve racks are.

Thursday night we had kind of a preview reception, so we got to meet each other and see the show for the first time. Michael has some incredible sculptures, his process is extremely labor intensive, and also some great drawings and collages. I especially liked one drawing I called "blue zombies" - later I looked at the pricelist and saw it's called Gore. He's a good drawer. I want to put my arms around the sculptures and have my picture taken with them.

Susan Jamison sold four paintings already!!! Three to the same husband/wife collectors! They bought one of mine last year. They know they're stuff!! Susan Jamison is hot!! Her work's not bad either!

Jamison works in egg tempera and makes sweet allegorical delicate paintings. I don't mean sweet like nauseous - just sweet. I said something to her about that and she said she once had a problem with it, making stuff that's sweet, until someone quoted I think Fitzgerald to her - something like "people who don't like sentiment are afraid of it". Damn facts!! I'll have to ask her again! My two current favorite Jamisons are not among the four that sold - one with a spider's web being brushed with red pigment and another with a group of yellow finches each connected to a different finger of the same hand by a red thread. Both of these red thread pieces made me think of the red thread of Japanese Buddhism and the red thread of the kabbalah, but Jamison said she wasn't thinking of those things.

Speaking of egg tempera - my favorite egg tempera artist is Sarah McEneaney! She is the master - I can't believe they put Amy Cutler in the Whitney Biennial before Sarah! Who's next? Marcel Dzama?? NO CANADIANS!!!

Holy Smokes! There are no Sarah Mceneaney pictures on Artnet!! That's what you get for living in Philadelphia!

By the way, all of my work SOLD OUT last night before the show has officially even opened to buyers including Charles Saatchi and the Guggenheim!!!!