In Brief: Yura Adams at Lake George Arts Project

Yura Adams speaks in front of her 12-part installation Fast Earth Wall at LGAP

I first became aware of Yura Adams' paintings when I saw them on the final day of a solo exhibition at John Davis Gallery in Hudson last year. So, naturally, I was excited recently to learn she would be showing at another favorite venue, the Lake George Arts Project's Courthouse Gallery in Lake George Village, this spring.

Cold Morning Foggy Glow 2018, oil on canvas

The show, entitled Fast Earth, features some of the best work from the John Davis exhibition, as well as a good portion of very different new work created in handmade paper and mixed media. The contrast is striking, both in style and content, as Adams has chosen in the new work to confront our global climate change crisis by constructing a storyboard of free-form pieces on one large wall of the gallery. The 12-part installation requires decoding, handily provided on a printed sheet, and nicely written in a terse almost poetic style. Adams describes the piece as a "speculation on the redesign of earth by climate change" and as "a transition of meaning." This challenging and complex effort is unusual in abstract art, and incorporates a range of materials including vinyl, inkjet printing, and acrylic.

Twilight Flourish 2018, oil on canvas

Meanwhile, on the other side of the gallery, three of the earlier  paintings shimmer brilliantly (two are shown here). Though they read as abstract, they are inspired by and aim to depict rare and specific effects of light. Here, Adams indulges in her love of science, from which she has learned the causes of the visual phenomena she has observed and attempted to recapture in paint: crystals in the atmosphere or on the ground.

The results are not just interesting as strong color compositions; they are also worthy of greater attention, as they reveal unknown truths about the world we think we see, but don't really understand.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday afternoons; the show continues through June 14.

Like Sugar at Tang Teaching Museum

Installation shot of Like Sugar at Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum

photograph by Arthur Evans

The exhibition Like Sugar, on view through June 23 at Skidmore College's Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery in Saratoga Springs, is an unusually thought-provoking show that, like its namesake, still somehow comes off seeming insubstantial.

Organized by the Tang's Malloy Curator Rachel Seligman and Skidmore English professor Sarah Goodwin, with input from three other Skidmore faculty members, Like Sugar may suffer from the too-many-cooks syndrome, as it attempts many diverse things. Is it about art? Of course. Food? Check. History? Global economics? Advertising? Health? All of the above.

Julia Jacquette, Two Tiered Cookie Platter, 1997
enamel on wood panel

As an art exhibition, Like Sugar is a bit sparse for my taste, but it features some very good work. Unfortunately, several of the best artists in the show are represented by only one piece each, which can be frustrating. On the plus side, while the show has very much to say, it doesn't overwhelm the viewer with didactic panels or unbearable preachiness - it manages to maintain a light playful tone despite the deadly seriousness of its content.

I think the show makes plain just how conflicted we are as a society - and individually - about sugar. It's killing us, but we love it. Historically, the sugar trade drove the creation and growth of the horror of the slave trade. This is delved into through visceral works by Kara Walker and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and alluded to in historical and contemporary documentary photographs also in the exhibition. Even honey bees get some of the blame - or credit - from both the scientific perspective and the creative one, as a video piece in the show records an experiment demonstrating their preference for sugar, and three fascinating sculptures in the show are a collaboration between a human artist, Garnett Puett, and comb-making bee colonies.

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Among the most shocking materials in Like Sugar are the many mid-twentieth-century magazine ads collected and presented in a grand collage and also individually, where we can see the audacity of Madison Avenue's efforts to sell a nutrition-free, highly caloric product to an unsuspecting and exuberant post-war consumer. As a child of the '60s, I was the direct recipient of the concepts these ads promoted, and it particularly struck me that the majority of the artists in this show were too - born between 1959 and 1965, a rather narrow demographic band to see in a large group show.

Clearly, we were all affected, and the impacts are still seen in the obesity and diabetes epidemics that plague the United States today. These diseases are explored in a display of public service graphics that attempt to scare people straight off the sugar track, and in photographs and paintings that simultaneously seduce and disgust.

Emily Eveleth, Big Pink, 2016, oil on canvas

One of the strongest pieces in the show, which is used prominently in publicity for it, is a six-and-a-half-foot painting by Emily Eveleth entitled Big Pink, which employs scale, gorgeous painterly flourishes, pastry worship, and frankly pornographic effects to drive home several points at once. Like the ad pictured above, which advises eating cookies rather than a healthy lunch as a weight-loss strategy, it's creepy - and irresistible.

All in all, Like Sugar may be overly ambitious, but it got that way for important reasons. More art exhibitions should make such efforts, even if falling short is almost inevitable.

And, while you're in the neighborhood, check out a first-rate three-person show at the Saratoga Arts Center. Passing Time, on view through June 15, features paintings, photographs, and sculptures by Paul Chapman, Harry Wirtz, and Rebecca Flis (respectively). In a happy coincidence, some of Flis's ingenious cast works are made of - you guessed it - sugar. I promise you will like.

Rebecca Flis Ironscapes, cast iron, crushed red stone, steel perimeter