Artist: Elise Adibi
Exhibition title: Respiration Paintings
Venue: Full Haus, Los Angeles, US
Date: May 28 – September 12, 2016
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Full Haus, Los Angeles
Nineteenth century critic Gottfried Semper theorized weaving to be the germ of architecture’s structural thinking. Semper’s ideas have influenced Adibi’s relationship to the woven surface of her paintings. Whether through the weave of the raw canvas, which she considers to be a grid before any marks have been made, or as a drawn pencil lattice, Adibi presents the grid as a living form, complicating its modernist legacy as an emblem of the anti-natural.
In her most recent body of work, Adibi applies a mixture of oil paints and pure essential plant oils to canvas. The paintings will be installed in the gallery, accompanied by viewing benches scented with a lavender fragrance created by Adibi using plant oils inspired by the vegetation found in Los Angeles. The perfume contains jasmine, orange, lemon, bergamot, cedar wood, and lavender. Both a color and a smell, lavender has a long history of medicinal and healing properties. Lavender and humans have co-evolved: at once soothing and invigorating, its smell resonates in our psyches.
By infusing Full Haus’ modernist architecture with a potent unseen substance, Adibi’s work binds together viewer and paintings with a bodily experience: volatile lavender molecules physically enter the nasal passages of a perceiver. The paintings, the aromatherapy, the architecture, and the viewer become a single ecosystem.
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Elise Adibi has had solo exhibitions at Louis B. James (2014), Churner and Churner (2012), and Southfirst (2010) in New York, as well as numerous group exhibitions, including Gertrude’s/Lot at the Andy Warhol Museum. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University from 2013-2014, where she presented a solo exhibition entitled Metabolic Paintings (2013). Her paintings are included in Thames & Hudson’s Painting Now as well as William J. Simmon’s influential essay Notes on Queer Formalism; her work has also appeared in Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times, among others. Adibi holds a BA from Swarthmore College (1988) and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania (1994). She earned her MFA in painting from Columbia University in 2007.
Elise Adibi, Lavender Chord, 2016
Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and lavender essential oil on canvas, 30” x 30”
Elise Adibi, Lavender Chord, 2016 (detail)
Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and lavender essential oil on canvas, 30” x 30”
Elise Adibi, Metabolic Painting, 2013
Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and lemon, mint, clary sage, bay laurel and black spruce essential plant oils on canvas, 20” x 20”
Elise Adibi, Lavender Grid (Loop), 2016 (detail)
Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and lavender, lavender absolute, benzoin, lemon, orange, bergamot, cedarwood, and jasmine essential plant oils on canvas, 72” x 72”
Elise Adibi, Lavender Grid, 2015 (detail)
Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and lavender essential plant oil on canvas, 20” x 20”
Elise Adibi, Radiolaria, 2015
Rabbit skin glue, oil paint, cardamom, lemon and sandalwood essential plant oils on canvas, 30” x 30”
Elise Adibi, Radiolaria, 2015 (detail)
Rabbit skin glue, oil paint, cardamom, lemon and sandalwood essential plant oils on canvas, 30” x 30”
Elise Adibi, Lavender Chord, 2016
Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and lavender essential oil on canvas, 30” x 30”
Elise Adibi, Lavender Grid (Loop), 2016
Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and lavender, lavender absolute, benzoin, lemon, orange, bergamot, cedarwood, and jasmine essential plant oils on canvas, 72” x 72”
Elise Adibi, Lavender Grid, 2015
Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and lavender essential plant oil on canvas, 20” x 20”
Elise Adibi, Metabolic Painting, 2013
Rabbit skin glue, graphite, oil paint and lemon, mint, clary sage, bay laurel and black spruce essential plant oils on canvas, 20” x 20”
Elise Adibi, Plant Painting, 2013
Rabbit skin glue, oil paint and lemon and neroli essential plant oils on canvas, 20” x 20”
Elise Adibi, Radiolaria, 2015
Rabbit skin glue, oil paint, cardamom, lemon and sandalwood essential plant oils on canvas, 30” x 30”