“Suppose that/ everything that greens and grows/ should blacken in one moment, flower and branch./ I think I could find your blinded hand.”
-Tennessee Williams

Josée Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present Your Blinded Hand, Adam Ogilvie’s second one-person exhibition.  The exhibition consists of a new group of paintings and sculptures.  The title for the show, "Your Blinded Hand’” comes from a Tennessee Williams poem about the drive to search for and believe in love, in the midst of disaster.  Like the poem, the work is neither pre nor post apocalyptic; it explores the ever-expanding present that we never leave, a direct reaction to the possibilities of birth in a dark time. 

Adam Ogilvie’s dreamlike imagery, the unnatural light and colors with figures and objects seemingly frozen in time, bring to mind the world of Metaphysical painting and its deceptive simplicity. The paintings are flat, edges pushing against edges. With a relentless innocence, the work believes, in a Matissian sense, in the healing powers of light and color.

Ogilvie examines the facade of myth as a cultural device. He draws from ancestral legend mixed with borrowed mythological metaphors. The imagery is deeply rooted in pop and folk iconography, early video games, childhood cartoons, psychedelic culture and the sign paintings of Woody Guthrie’s America. At the same time the work is influenced by the traditions of far eastern vessels and scrolls, Byzantine stained glass and the high art of the 1940s and 50s. Oscillating between abstraction and representation the way one might cross the street, Ogilvie dissects the language of myth.  The result is an exploration of the impenetrable and self-reflexive vocabulary of painting, a combination of geometric and biomorphic forms without a regard for their differences.

A new body of sculptures has shed the previous skins of evident construction.  These new, seamless forms, with a nod to Brancusi’s Bird in Flight, belie their creation.  They appear as organic totems, painted and placed atop pedestals like religious artifacts from an unknown faith. They seem to document an archeological dig for cave drawings inscribed in the subconscious; a search for the paintings and shapes that inform the primal - love, belief, libido, anxiety. 

Born in 1971, Adam Ogilvie lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has a B.A. in fine arts from Yale University and a M.F.A from the School of Visual Arts, New York.



The artist wishes to thank Bill Coleman Design for the pedestals.