PATRON is proud to present our first solo exhibition, All water has a perfect memory, with Chicago-based artist Lindsay Adams (b. 1990, Washington D.C.). The exhibition’s title takes inspiration from Toni Morrison’s “The Site of Memory,” an essay exploring the nature of memory and narrative truth, specifically in context of the historic Black American experience. Adams’s debut exhibition will consist of new paintings and drawings (both on paper and mirror tile), a grouping threaded together by an exploration of how water’s fluid nature can act and serve as a metaphorization of memory, emotional truth, and place.

Through the performative act of painting—gestural and intuitive mark-making, Adams excavates her very own site of memory. Adams’s large-scale painting, titled All water has a perfect memory, stands as the exhibition’s namesake and anchor in this presentation. Layered in deep and saturated hues of red, the washes of color push and pull spatial depth, and vibrant gestural marks evoke a sense of dancerly movement. Abstracted from an idealized, imagined natural landscape, moments of both intensity and softness emerge, embodying the fluidity and layered nuance of memory at the heart of the exhibition—like water in constant flux; receding, resurfacing, and reshaping itself over time.

Adams’s new suite of drawings, Untitled (The Site of Memory, Morrison), act as quotidian ritual, highlighting the immediate mark making of her hand. Each drawing, akin to the pages in a journal, alternates between thin, delicate lines and broad strokes in ink, graphite, and charcoal. Translating these gestures from paper to the reflective surface of 20 mirror panels, Adams’s mirror drawing, Refraction, tests the relationship between physical material and presence. Here, the reflective surface resists fixity found in her works on paper, and transcends pure reproduction to actively engage with perception, physical space, and implied time.