We are happy to present Isabelle Adams, first solo exhibtion  “Once a Day, Everyday, All Day Long” At Garage Number 1.

Isabelle Adams: “Once a Day, Everyday, All Day Long”

“That sweet odor that girls have. The softness of her blouse. He catches a glimpse of the gentle shadows amid her thighs, as she curls her legs up under her. He stares hard at her. He has a lot of meaning packed into that stare, but she's not even looking. She's popping her gum and watching television. She's sitting right there, inches away, soft, fragrant, and ready: but what's his next move?”

Robert Coover, The Babysitter

The films of the 1970s and 80s seem to produce a myriad of instances of men peering through women's windows. Most notably, this became a trope of the slasher genre. Voyeuristic pov shots put the audience in the place of the killer, implicating us in his horny gaze. What gratification might come when the physical violence of this interaction is, for the moment, removed?

Isabelle Adams’ “Once a day, Everyday, All Day Long” engages in a similar play with audience implication, objectification, and subject autonomy. The paintings invite the audience to take pleasure in positioning themselves as both the viewed woman and the voyeur. The murderous comparison needn’t be overstated. What, instead, are the pleasures of identification between audience and subject, and what would it mean to happily inhabit an objectified body? When the rules are bent, discomfort and desire are given room to overlap through Adams’ tantalizingly off circumstances.

In recent years, popular culture has suffered from a widespread libidinal atrophy. Adams’ work situates itself between opposition and uncertainty, on the edge of a new era of eroticism. Cliches of the ‘painting’ as a mirror and a window will not be banished. Media and tropes of previous cultural generations condense into raw material and are added to the pile of props available in the quest for personal authorship. With a self-aware, more reflexive eye we can see all these things with a birds eye view, before they creep up to our window and see us.
Statement by Daniel Champion and Isabelle Adams

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