PDX Contemporary Art will exhibit new paintings and drawings by Adam Sorensen. 19th century Romantic painting and Asian art of the same era are starting points for Sorensen’s work. The shifting notion of the sublime, both in the landscape as well as modern life and culture, are explored metaphorically in these works.
He may reference the external world in these paintings (all 2010), but only indirectly, relying instead on artistic traditions for inspiration. His subject matter brings to mind the work of earlier artists in the American West—Eadweard Muybridge and Carleton Watkins in Yosemite, Albert Bierstadt in the Sierra Nevadas. Sorensen, however, recognizing the long-ago disappearance of an exotically unfamiliar geography scouted by expansionist artist-explorers, patrols a different kind of frontier. His liminal territory is an emotional or psychological one, involving futuristic fantasy and affective, sometimes anxious responses to nature.
-Sue Taylor
