Her Colors Do Things

Her Colors Do Things

Celeste | Adee Roberson | Ruth Root


September 30th — November 4th, 2023

Exhibition Opening: Saturday, September 30, 5-8PM



Shapes are things whose outlines hit you in the eye. Color and shape are bright tools for perception and contradiction…Her colors do things: they loom up, they come at you in big corporeal patches, as blobs and facades and silhouettes that confront you like an encounter with another person or their shadow…Bodies, shapes, colors, and sizes therefore achieve equivalent objecthood.

– From Amy Sillman’s Faux Pas. Selected Writings and Drawings



Inside of you there are 3 ghosts, arranged not across linear time as the Dickensonian specters were speculated, but rather as piercing channels of intersection.

The first is Painting.
The second is Image.
The third is itself a perverse confluence of life, the corporeal, the material, the tangible, the means of production, and what curator and super thinker Legacy Russell calls “AFK”—the away from the keyboard. Oversimplified with a cautious nod over at Lacan, we might say
the third is The Real.

The first ghost sits still, is a still life, but restlessly so because what Painting did and what Painting does produce very different effects, so uncertainty, doubt, and convulsions between uselessness and utility course through it, taking aim at its ghost-mates. Painting is a thing that results from whipping up all the oopsie-doopsie leavings of abjection into formal stabilization, at least for long enough for it to be looked upon. Painting is a reorganization of the material (and that has big ole consequences around taste, class, meaning, canon, head canon) and it is descriptive of the immaterial (theories, psyches, syntaxes, concepts, glyphs, glitches, witches, switches, bitches). When Celeste does painting, it includes stains striking harmonious dance moves, curtains fluttering against soft spoken catastrophe, interlaced tender tendrils in blushing, flushing earth tones. When Adee Roberson does painting, a rhapsody of aura-vibrating, fruit smoothie shapes shimmy into abutments and overlaps, animating a dazzling field of fluorescence, confectionary tints, and beachy aquatic cool notes. When Ruth Root does painting, accretions of offbeat color fields, spray paint, printed textile, loops, straps, scalloping silhouettes, and glimmering grommets drop the history of the medium into the middle of multiple concurrent conversations concerned with virtuality, physicality, and a sensuality of their tensions.

The second ghost is really a most upsetting ghost of a ghost, a wraith residing in half life. Magritte named it Treachery, and Steyerl named it Poverty. Image does not represent. Image cannot answer to its culture’s demands for veracity, not when it drifts so blithely toward its embeddedness in the imaginary. Ruth Root is an Image Consultant, a code-switcher culling cultural shorthand, avatars, patterns and decorations (and Ornament and Crime). Adee Roberson is an Image Archivist, bringing the supple, velvety curves of her abstract formal vocabularies up to the edges of images that serve to remember, historicize, and bring back forward again. Celeste is glad to leave Image per se out of frame, instead relishing its long, seductive shadows and the Shadow Work to be done with them.

The third ghost is catalytic and consequential. It is the keeper of the prompts by which the im/materials of painting are animated and the referent to which the image is meant to answer. It is the testing ground onto which paintings are thrust; it mediates, fails to mediate, the differences between images and all of what is outside and beyond images. At the moment, the third ghost is a gallery. It’s an exhibition. It’s a visitor to an exhibition.

Among these paintings and against the images with which they reckon
the third ghost is you.

Her Colors Do Things, 2023, installation image

Her Colors Do Things, 2023, installation image

Celeste, Nocturna, 2022, Pigments and acrylic base on dyed cotton canvas, 59h x 39 1/2w in.

Celeste, Nocturna, 2022, detail image

Her Colors Do Things, 2023, installation image

Adee Roberson, Coastal Echoes, 2019, Acrylic and pastel on linen, 61h x 100w in.

Adee Roberson, Coastal Echoes, 2019, detail image

Ruth Root, Untitled 1, 2019, Fabric, Sintra, enamel, spray paint, and digitally printed fabric, 72h x 96w in.

Ruth Root, Untitled 1, 2019, detail image

Her Colors Do Things, 2023, installation image

Adee Roberson, Tropic of Cancer, 2022, Screenprint and acrylic on wood, 16h x 20w in.

Adee Roberson, Tropic of Cancer, 2022, alternate view

Her Colors Do Things, 2023, installation image

Celeste, El amante II, 2021, Pigments and acrylic base on dyed cotton canvas, 47 1/4h x 30w in.

Celeste, El amante II, 2021, detail image

Ruth Root, Untitled, 2016, Fabric, plexiglas, enamel, spray paint, and digitally printed fabric, 88 1/4h x 53 1/2w in.

Ruth Root, Untitled, 2016, detail image

Her Colors Do Things, 2023, installation image

Adee Roberson, 62 Moons, 2022, Acrylic and pastel on linen, 46 1/2h x 58 1/2w in.

Adee Roberson, 62 Moons, 2022, detail image

Celeste, Vasija sobre vasija sobre vasija, 2021, Pigments and acrylic base on dyed cotton canvas, 177w x 138dw in.

Celeste, Vasija sobre vasija sobre vasija, 2021, detail image

Her Colors Do Things, 2023, installation image