Adrienne Elyse Meyers

We have always been ending

Feb 5-26, 2021

It has always been like this. We are watching the scaffolding go up on a new building, smelling the sawdust and sneaking a touch of the soft pine boards. There was a fire at the apartments under construction next to the little gated cemetery. One person was trapped and had to jump down the balconies until they were rescued. In the new house there was a dusty plywood floor. In the corner we put a white antique vanity table, crusted with stenciled-on craft paint. In another corner we put an oil lamp on a wobbly three-legged table. In another corner we put a broom for sweeping up broken glass.

Every piece to this story says we’ve always been ending. We’ve always been burning and confessing, lurking in doorways, erecting structures and unearthing ruins, singing songs to stop the world from turning and songs to bring each new day.

We’ve been here before, not a thousand times, but perpetually. Images return to visit, each time asking if they ever really left. That peculiar sense of a certain place, the smell of fresh-cut wood, the hymn you’ve heard countless times, always in a different tempo.

These paintings catch some of the images that resurface. Parts are unfilled, leaving us to see the back of the stages lit in warm reds and pinks. They come in and out of focus, moving through periphery scratching their way through thin layers of paint. Catch yourself looking and they might just look back or bring you to a place you never really left.