Adrian Rhodes of Hartsville, SC, received her BFA (2005) and MFA (2011) from Winthrop University. She is the recipient of the South Carolina Arts Commission’s 2020 Individual Artist’s Fellowship and the 2019 SECAC Artist’s Fellowship. Her work has been included in group exhibitions including "Drawn: Concept and Craft" at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston Salem, "Paper Worlds" at the Spartanburg Art Museum, 2019’s "Coined in the South'' at the Mint Museum Uptown Charlotte, and Manifest Gallery’s "CUT: Works Made by or About Cutting" in 2021. Winner of the 2020 701 CCA Prize from the 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, SC, she was featured in presentations of the 701 CCA SC Biennial in 2019 and 2021.
Adrian’s work is about relationships, and the complexity of closeness- the desire to separate from your past and return to it in the same breath. Across a wide ranging multidisciplinary practice, she explores how the repetition of deeply iconographic imagery and motifs reflect recurring, intrusive thought patterns and an inability to move past emotional trauma.
As a medium based in creation of the multiple, print becomes a method for creating structure. This framework, indulging a desire for order, creates space for disruption. This work is about the people who should be in the room, and are not there. It is about the presence of absence. A meditation on grief, the passage of time, the fleeting nature of joy, and the struggle to hold contradictory feelings simultaneously.
It is about anxiety and the lack of control, the stiff upper lip and carrying on regardless.