Poles, Walkers and a Black Sheep

China Adams

May 17- June 28, 2025

Los Angeles, CA — CMAY Gallery is pleased to present China Adams’ latest exhibition, Poles, Walkers and a Black Sheep, bringing together two distinct yet intertwined bodies of work, each investigating what we lean on —physically, socially, and culturally—as our systems falter. Known for engaging with materials and ideas often cast aside or overlooked, Adams continues her exploration— considering infrastructure, buttressing, and inevitable decline. One series features meticulously economized drawings of utility poles— some rendered in Micron pen and pencil, others in pencil and gouache. Stripped of background, the drawings heighten the poles’ uncanny geometry as they slice the sky. These everyday structures—often coated in tar, plastered with old staples and rusting metal—are drawn with delicate precision. Adams’ choice to frame these gritty relics as subjects of beauty, elevates the mundane, while underscoring their fragility. As functional as they are outdated, utility poles today are paradoxical symbols: they connect us, while at the same time they are aging relics, increasingly implicated in climate-related disasters like wildfires. In dialogue with these drawings is a sculptural series, merging geriatric walkers with painted and sewn canvas. These hybrid forms bend, sag, and shift with each installation. The canvas— brightly colored and striped, stitched tightly yet flexible—engages in a conversation of balance and tension with its metallic, walker frame. Yellow hues and circus-like motifs, straddle warning and whimsy, evoking both the grotesque and the celebratory. Each piece carries a personality; the interplay of color, weight, and form determines how canvas and walker support—or strain— each other. Together, these works propose a meditation on the nature of support: the poles carry the burden of modern infrastructure, while the walkers prop up aging bodies. Both are scaffolds for systems in decline. Adams positions the walker sculptures as contemporary memento mori— artifacts that quietly remind us of aging, entropy, and the uncomfortable truths we often look away from. There is a conflict at the heart of the exhibition: between structure and collapse, the rigid and the yielding, function and failure. With Poles, Walkers and a Black Sheep, China Adams invites viewers to contemplate the fragile architectures that hold us up—and what happens when those structures can no longer bear the weight.

This Exhibition was gratefully supported with a USC Roski School of Art, Lyon’s Fund Grant.