CONDO NEW YORK Opens Friday, 7/29

Adams and Ollman and Chapter NY are pleaseed to collaboratively present Julie Béna, Julie Curtiss, and Joy Feasley in a group exhibiton as part of Condo New York, on view June 29 through July 27, 2018. Julie Béna works in performance, sculpture, film, and installation creating open-ended and surreal narrative works that combine influences of populare culture, listerature, and mythology. For Condo, Adams and Ollman and Chapter NY will present the first part of Béna's film Have you seen Patopan Rose?. In her performance Béna brings Pantopon Rose, a fleeting character in William S. Bourroughs' 1959 novel Nake Lunch, to life in a surrealist narrative.

Although the film was begun Although the film was begun in 2015, the origins of Have you seen Pantopon Rose? as a performative project date to 2011. The narrative of Pantopon Rose accompanied Be?na over the years, unfolding and blending with the artist's own personal history. "Rose became me, and I became Rose in a way," the artist has said. Be?na is interested in these blurred truths or fictions, in the potential porosity and ambiguity of autobiography and in the isolated symbols and tropes we use to construct and demarcate identity. Accompanying the film are sculptures by the artist including a new hanging mobile which features a performative dance of suspended symbols that echo the often absurdist action and language in Be?na's film.

Julie Curtiss's practice explores representations of female identity. She merges feminine markers of cultural refinement and natural forms, often associated with the female figure, within unsettling narrative contexts that call these associations into question. Her tightly framed compositions, meticulous brushstrokes, vibrant colors, and playfully stylized figures harken back to the iconic visual vocabulary of the Chicago Imagists, while her enigmatic scenes and symbolism reference Surrealism. In her painting, Lateral Embrace II, Curtiss portrays two anonymous female figures in profile, their faces concealed by oscillating ripples of tightly coiled hair. Together their organic silhouettes merge into a curtain-like form, inviting the viewer to peel back the billowing surface to uncover their secret identity. However, because Curtiss's subjects appear fragmented and anonymous, the self remains cryptic and intentionally unresolved. Curtiss's gouache, Blinders, similarly upends conventional representation by concealing the subject's eyes from the viewer. Grotesque hands adorned with claw-like, magenta painted nails shield the subject's vision from something unknown leaving the viewer to ponder their own involvement in the masquerade.

Joy Feasley's paintings use the language of folk art and material culture, imagery inspired by the landscape and natural wonders, and references to the art historical canon to reconnect with, or resurrect arcane but powerful ideas. The concept of luck has factored into Feasley's work for many years, often through the use of symbols, each one rooted in folklore, tradition or mythology. In the works on view in the exhibition, all from 2007, the artist continues the tradition of the coded still life with secret messages hidden in the twists and turns of lucky bamboo, here rendered with a visionary obsessiveness.