BOSTON, MA – Beginning July 5, 2018, Fountain Street gallery will be exhibiting “Unturned,” featuring the work of painter Shao Yuan Zhang and sculptor Fafnir Adamites. Unturned conjures the simplicity, beauty and power found in nature. These are the fundamental and inevitable forces that drive our works for this groundbreaking show.

Shao Yuan Zhang’s energetic oil paintings of stallions explore and illustrate movement through nature. His work represents his immigrant journey, and moments of his Chinese self-identity intersecting with the surrounding American culture into which he wades. Zhang incorporates both contemporary – watercolor – and traditional – ink calligraphy – painting styles in his work, blending notes of energy, optimism, eagerness, hunger, and naiveté with strokes of indifference toward the societal obsession with materialism over nature.

Zhang reconciles the traditional style he learned as a woodcut artist crafting propaganda art for the communist party during the Cultural Revolution with the contemporary technique he learned in the U.S. He has participated in numerous exhibitions, including a show of portraits at the famed 798 Art District in Beijing, and several international exhibitions including Chinese National Art Exhibitions. The Jamaica Plain-based Zhang is Core Member at Fountain Gallery..

Fafnir Adamites uses feltmaking and other traditional craft processes to create sculptural and installation works that serve as meditations on trauma, memory and the legacy of emotional turmoil inherited from past generations. The theory that anxieties and traumas are embedded in a person’s DNA and are then passed down to the next generation is a major motivation in her artwork. Material exploration is the starting point for all of her work; using a repetitious process such as feltmaking plays a key role in building the conceptual backing of each piece. There is a Sisyphean element to both the physical labor and the conceptual ideas- retracing the path of ancestors, repeating personal patterns, physically tracing the words from a written text, acknowledging both herplace as a maker within this context and the irresolvable nature of the concepts themselves.

Adamites holds an MFA degree from the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Photography and Women’s Studies from UMass Amherst. She teaches at Snow Farm: The New England Craft Program, UMass Amherst, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and at The Academy at Charlemont. She lives in Turners Falls, MA.

“Unturned” will run from July 5th through July 29th. The Gallery is located at 460c Harrison Ave. #2, Boston, MA and is open Wednesday through Sunday from 12 to 6pm, or by appointment.