Exhibits & Events

Please join us on Thursday, October 10th, from 18:00 - 22:00, for the opening of Wedged Between Day and Night, Adam Lovitz’s third exhibition and first solo with COMMONWEAL. This show takes its name from the compression of time that prescribes Lovitz’s studio schedule—after the kids have gone to bed or woven around life's many other responsibilities, and before exhaustion overwhelms.

Lovitz is aware that he and his wife are constantly being surveilled by their two young sons and, as one of their guardians, he is incapable of not observing and appraising  them in response—imbuing even their smallest unconscious actions with importance. There is an intense joy to being a role model and seeing your best behavior reflected admirably by your children and a deep angst when either they don’t pick up on the importance of certain social gestures or the behavior they embrace of yours is not you at your best. Darting eyes and furtive glances feature prominently within his recent mixed-media paintings, which may not come as a surprise. That one of his works features a satellite’s view of the earth and the cosmos, each featuring natural bodies exerting systems of influence upon one another, speaks to the scale and scope of feelings produced in these moments.

Lovitz’s new works embrace the exuberant color palette and visual intensity of childhood’s graphic culture. They explore the act of discovery as a shared experience rooted in observation and evoke storytelling and the abstractions of myth which are among the earliest social devices we use to construct a worldview.

While he has always constructed his painting’s imagery through a methodical process of the addition and elimination of paint, minerals and found objects resulting in  three-dimensional surfaces that blur the line between relief, sculpture and painting. In Wedged Between Day and Night, Lovitz takes this cumulative approach a step further and for the first time in over a decade has chosen to move away from the strict rectangular format he has used and instead begin to assemble surfaces into huddled arrangements. This new approach allows him the ability to metaphorically convey fluctuations in time and shifts in perception while employing static imagery.

His metaphor is apt—time is always moving though we feel we remain the same—and time is on Lovitz’s mind. Being so highly attuned to the development of others reinforces a sense of one’s own inevitable progression through the same process. Other times these assemblages unfold a space or narrative, like a piece of origami flattened to show its creases and gesture towards potential conclusions. Through seeing the world through his children’s eyes it’s become ever more apparent that, as an adult, perception is a cultivated approach of removing interpretive potential. In these new paintings Lovitz is attempting to forgo this impulse and create images that can hold many, potentially contradictory, stories at once.

Leave it to an artist whose most salient early-childhood memory is a bubblegum factory across from a superfund site in his hometown to create work focused upon the contrasting dualities inherent in our experience of life.