UNTURNED
Shao Yuan Zhang & Fafnir Adamites
July 5 – July 29, 2018
First Friday Reception: Friday, July 6, 6:00-8:00pm
Unturned features the work of Shao Yuan Zhang and Fafnir Adamites. The show highlights a variety of each artist’s work, including oil on canvas and sculptural work in plaster and paper. Unturned conjures the idea that we are shaped by outside forces, but remain unchanged, we persist in the face of adversity. It is what makes us human. This is the elemental force that drives the works in this graphically dynamic pairing.
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Fafnir Adamites creates sculptural works, using feltmaking, papermaking and other traditional craft processes, that act as monuments and reminders of trauma, intuition and the legacy of emotional turmoil inherited from past generations. Embedding meaning in both the materials and the repetitious processes plays a key role in building the conceptual backing of each piece.Fafnir Adamites holds an MFA degree from the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Photography and Women’s Studies from UMass Amherst. She teaches sculpture and various fiber techniques at Snow Farm: The New England Craft Program; UMass Amherst; Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts; and at The Academy at Charlemont. Fafnir is a member of Boston Sculptors Gallery. She lives in Turners Falls, MA.
Fafnir Adamites' Artist Statement
Fafnir Adamites' Artist Biography
Shao Yuan Zhang’s energetic oil paintings of stallions explore and illustrate movement through nature. His work represents his immigrant journey, and moments of his Chinese self-identity intersecting with the surrounding American culture into which he wades. Zhang incorporates both contemporary – watercolor – and traditional – ink calligraphy – painting styles in his work, blending notes of energy, optimism, eagerness, hunger, and naiveté with strokes of indifference toward the societal obsession with materialism over nature. Zhang reconciles the traditional style he learned as a woodcut artist crafting propaganda art for the communist party during the Cultural Revolution with the contemporary technique he learned in the U.S. He has participated in numerous exhibitions, including a show of portraits at the famed 798 Art District in Beijing, and several international exhibitions including Chinese National Art Exhibitions. He studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and holds an MFA degree from the University of Utah, where he taught drawing and painting for more than 20 years. The Jamaica Plain-based Zhang is Core Member at Fountain Gallery.
Delicious Line | Heather Kapplow