Up Close with Artist Rebecca Adams

Friday, July 15, 2011

Maggie Lange, GoLocalProv Contributor

Rebecca Adams needs things just so. She is a fine artist, but she thinks of herself as more of an organizer. She color-codes her books as well as her clothes. She paints in series, sets, and collections. Her latest paintings have been in sets of twenty, each segment featuring a black-and-white portrait of women performing a specific task.

In each of these collections, the women are holding a object that obscures their faces slightly—there is a set of twenty women drinking a large glass of milk, twenty women smoking cigarettes, twenty speaking on the phone, and twenty blowing their noses into large white tissues.

One into a million

“Once I started doing a few, I had to do a million,” says the RISD graduate, who almost looks like one of her own black-and-white portraits, with dark and neatly styled hair, pale skin, and a short black dress.

“What I love about Rebecca's work is that it shows her photography background and that it is so consistent with her own personal aesthetic,” says Lisa Newman, the owner of Home Style, an interior design shop in Providence that features Adams’ work. Newman adds that Adams “has a glamorous vintage style herself and these women look like they come from the same era.”

Collector’s aesthetic

Adams paints each of the individual portraits from a series of stock photographs from the 1950s. Trained as a photographer, she abandoned the medium because of its over-emphasis on technicality. Yet, she retrains an eye for the still image. Her translation of photographs into paintings captures a je ne sais quois from the original—pinning the emotion, rather than the realism.

It’s the collector’s aesthetic that drives Adams. The collection, 80 women in total, is compulsive and compelling. Adams quickly sold out her first show featuring these sets. When she designed an album cover for Providence noise-rock band, Daughters, fans of the band vehemently pursued her, desperate to acquire the cover art.

Adams has some of theories about people’s magnetism to her sets: “I think it’s the vintage aesthetic. I think that it’s anything in multiples draws the eye. I think they’re funny,” she adds finally laughing.

Greater than the sum of its parts

Each of these images carries meaning, but together something different emerges, greater than the sum of its parts. An individual portrait of a woman clutching a tissue is tragic, but five rows of four women crying into tissues are oddly funny.

“There is something nostalgic and a bit snarky about them at the same time,” says Lisa Newman about the grids of women.

Adams says that she is ready to move on from the women painting, “But I’m never going to stop doing series. It’s in my very nature to make collections.”

She glances above her desk to a small collection of scissors, hanging on the wall over her tiny workspace. “I say I’m obsessed with collecting, but it was more of organizational thing,” she says, “I like to put everything similar together.”

Everything in its place, the whole thing in a new, unique context.

Rebecca Adams’ show, along with artists Emeline Allen and Jillian Clark, is at Machines with Magnet’s gallery space at 400 Main Street, Pawtucket. Look at more of Adams’ work at www.rebeccamadams.com or www.rebeccamasonadams.etsy.com.

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

Email to a friend Permalink