Adam Sorensen: Places

Artists

• Adam Sorensen

Statement

For 10 years the subject for my work has been landscape. My influences have been historic examples of the genre across several cultures, and my medium has been oil on canvas and linen. I’ve honed my process and handling of the materials over time, and let the repetition of my practice push the work forward. The vantage point from where I began this body of work, rests atop the last decades worth of paintings.

In the past I’ve labeled my paintings as “psychedelic landscapes” as a short hand or what they actually are. The slow, physical materialization of each piece is rife with conflicting and complimentary emotional weight, and only hints at realism. The emptiness of each one can conjure either an untouched utopia, or a more sinister absence. I feel that individual pieces have both an exuberance or joy, as well as a kind of despair or longing. This tension becomes the great metaphor of my work.

The years spent making these paintings, have been years spent within a unique place within myself. At times this place has been an escape, and at other times, a confinement, but it’s always been a place I’m compelled to inhabit. This seems to be a shared human feature. We long for ideas of other places, yet feel the loss of different places in the process. Each path chosen, eliminates an infinite number of other paths.

For this body of work, I’ve attempted to chose multiple paths. The spare, and chromatically limited pieces of “Catagonia” and “Thrace”, contrast with more vibrant and whimsical “Akka” and “Zebulon”. The former are related to a fifteen foot commission for the US State Department in Taipei and the latter are an extension of the foreground-specific mushroom paintings that were started for a specific project last year. All of these paintings allowed me to approach the smaller works with a certain freedom.