Upper East Side, New York
Merrick Adams
Wayfinder
TurnTurn Gallery is pleased to present Wayfinder, a solo exhibition featuring Merrick Adams. This marks his second exhibition with the gallery. Throughout history, various religions and spiritualities have turned to water as a source of purification, surrender, and rebirth. Adams looks to explore that unique spiritual charge. In Wayfinder, he expands his meditation on the ocean as both subject and symbol. Three arched canvases—shaped to echo the lancet windows of a chapel or temple—anchor the exhibition, framing each painting as a portal rather than a picture. By its nature, the sea resists containment. It is vast, unknowable, a persistent reminder of forces greater than oneself. Adams's paintings function as microcosms of the uncontainable, presenting a pause for reflection. Drawing from the techniques of woodcut and silkscreen, his surfaces are built and stripped back across countless layers, yielding a luminous web of rippling line and color that rises and falls in hypnotic, almost breathing motion. Consciousness, too, has its tides. Adams's surfaces can appear calm or vigorous, but beneath either lies an immeasurable interior world. Glowing reflections of sunlight and moonlight move through the depths of each canvas, not so much showing the way as confirming that there is one. Wayfinder takes its title from an ancient navigational practice: crossing open water by reading stars, currents, wind, and memory rather than fixed instruments. It is a mode of travel that requires trust. In invoking it, Adams speaks to a contemporary spiritual condition of searching for direction in a fragmented world. Merrick Adams received his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and holds a BFA with a concentration in Printmaking from East Carolina University. Solo presentations include Turn Gallery, New York, NY; La Loma, Los Angeles, CA; and Scott Miller Projects, Birmingham, AL. Adams has participated in group exhibitions at Barnsdall Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; La Loma, Los Angeles, CA; and Kutlesa Gallery, Arth, Switzerland, among others. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.