GET IN LINE
November 20 – December 28, 2002

During the months of November and December, George Adams Gallery will present a group exhibition entitled Get in Line featuring work by Jose Bedia, Ambreen Butt, Valerie Demianchuk, Lesley Dill, Guillermo Kuitca, Katherine Shozawa, Stephen Sollins, and Julian Trigo. Comprised of 12 works by eight artists, the exhibition includes drawing, painting, and sculpture.

Get in Line explores the distinctive use and meaning of line as it is drawn, painted, sewn, or constructed. Among this diverse group of works in the exhibition, line is both a formal tool as well as a specific process that implies larger social and cultural concerns.

For example, Ambreen Butt's detailed mixed media drawings rely on the thin, delicate lines associated with Indian and Persian miniature painting. Butt combines contemporary imagery with the traditional style of painting to explore the complex experience of cultural integration, specifically that of Southeast Asian Muslim women living in the West.

Approaching line from a different perspective, Stephen Sollins' minimal line drawings are derived from the formal structures embedded in the layout of a newspaper. For example, in the series, Summary (2000), Sollins traces the vertical and horizontal frames that separate news stories and headlines. Devoid of text, the single and connected lines become surrogates for "information." Get In Line will present a selection of fourteen carbon transfer drawings on Japanese mulberry paper, each measuring 8 1/2 x 11 inches.

Other works in the exhibition include a new graphite drawing by Valerie Demianchuk and a new mixed media sculpture by Lesley Dill. Demianchuk’s meticulously rendered line drawing--an almost obsessive study of nature--depicts a spindly root floating in an expanse of blank paper. In contrast, Red Threads by Lesley Dill uses the free-floating line of loose threads to give visual form to language extracted from an Emily Dickinson poem.

Jose Bedia, Guillermo Kuitca, and Julian Trigo blur the boundaries of drawing and painting in their use of line. For example, the painting, Mosquito Coast by Kuitca is both architectural plan and atmospheric, painterly stage set. Trigo’s untitled painting from 1995—a charcoal smudged outline of a child figure bodily engaged with a chair--is executed on canvas even as it appears as a drawing. Similarly, Jose Bedia treats the canvas like paper, allowing the gesture of the line drawn figure, in Incansable Batalla Contra… for example, to dominate the composition.

Japanese-Canadian artist Katherine Shozawa also relies on the outline of imagery in her mixed media work Mrs. Murakami's House. Hand stitched in brown painted joot and thread onto vellum and fabric, the roughly hewn image depicts a pile of rubble of a former house, once used as a WWII Japanese internment site and until recently had remained a residence.

Get In Line will be on view through December 28. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday 10 am to 6 pm, Mondays by appointment. Images from the exhibition are available on the gallery's website at www.artnet.com/gadams.html and on the Art Dealers Association website, www.artdealers.org