Installation view, works by Elise Adibi in Elements, Allegheny Art Galleries, 2018
Elise Adibi
Gold and Osage Aromatherapy Painting, 2014. Rabbit skin glue, gilding glue, 24-karat gold leaf, osage pigment, oil paint and myrrh, bergamot and cedar wood essential plant oil on canvas
Organ, 2014. Rabbit skin glue, oil paint and frankincense, cedarwood, red mandarin and rosemary essential plant oils on canvas.
Chord (Red and Indigo), 2018. Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and nutmeg. Aged patchouli, lavender, jasmine, benzoin, Himalayan cedarwood, lemon, frankincense, vetiver, lime, black spruce, clary sage, bay laurel, aged patchouli, nutmeg, black pepper, holy basil essential plant oils on canvas
Elise Adibi
Chord (Orange and Maroon), 2018. Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and mint essential plant oil on canvas
Red Waves, 2018. Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and orange, red mandarin, lemon, bergamot essential plant oils on canvas
Gold Spiral, 2018. Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and mint essential plant oil on canvas
The woven grid inherent to the canvas serves as a starting point for the Chord, Wave, and Spiral paintings. From there, the artist creates algorithms to expand the patterns, eventually evoking forms both elemental and organic. The interwoven colors in the Chord paintings, for example, visually represent the structure of a musical chord, defined as three or more tones sounded simultaneously. Spirals and curves alternately read as ocean currents and particle waves.
The grid is a hallmark of modernist abstraction, a legacy which Adibi both engages and critiques. While modernist abstraction was defined by self-referentiality—art that explored its own surface properties—Adibi’s paintings gesture outside themselves toward nature and the body through their material makeup of plant oils and animal proteins. As Adibi describes them, “The stuff that comprises my paintings is what we too are made of … it is my belief that art can connect us to the regenerative powers in nature and within ourselves.”
Installation view, works by Elise Adibi in Elements, Allegheny Art Galleries, 2018
Installation view, works by Elise Adibi in Elements, Allegheny Art Galleries, 2018
Elise Adibi and JPC Eberle
Elise Adibi Respiration Paintings, The Film, 2017. 16 mm film, run time 7:37
This short experimental film documents Respiration Paintings, an exhibition in 2017 at the Frick Pittsburgh featuring paintings by Elise Adibi displayed alongside living plants in the museum’s historic greenhouse. The film highlights the dramatic changes enacted upon the surfaces of paintings made either from distilled plant oils, or oxidized with urine, salt, and vinegar on copper. Time-lapse captures the movements of wind, sun and moon animating the paintings, as well as periodic visits by insects and butterflies. With Respiration Paintings, Adibi developed her radical vision of art as both volatile and biological, concepts she continues to explore with the site-specific installation The Outermost Painting in the outdoor sculpture garden.
Installation view, works by Andrew Shirley in Elements, Allegheny Art Galleries, 2018
Installation view, works by Andrew Shirley in Elements, Allegheny Art Galleries, 2018.
Every summer for more than a century, Andrew Shirley’s family has convened at Shin Pond, located in a remote region of Northern Maine. All of the works on view picture scenes from Shin Pond, and in some cases, they bear elemental traces—fire and water— of its physical environment. Arrival marks the beginning of the retreat, when the family enters the site by boat. The charcoal-coated sculptures are found objects that Shirley scavenged from abandoned cabins around the pond. The artist’s addition of charcoal suggests the residue of campfire, a key site of family gathering and ritual at the pond. Likewise, Shirley used fire to make Out of the Fire #5, for which he smoked handmade paper and infused it with flecks of charcoal from his family’s annual end-of-summer bonfire. Along with Pond Paper, handmade papers that Shirley made while standing waist-deep in Shin Pond, Out of the Fire #5 is an abstraction that represents a place through materiality rather than visual description.