Symbiosis: A Conversation with Alicia Adamerovich and Christopher Daharsh
Left: portrait of Alicia Adamerovich, courtesy of Timothy Taylor Gallery. Right: portrait of Christopher Daharsh by Bradley Marshall, courtesy of the artist.
Artists Alicia Adamerovich and Christopher Daharsh are partners in life and in creativity. While the two share a rich, somber palette with organic geometries inspired by nature, the work of Daharsh is frequently activated by motion and kinetic energy, whereas Adamerovich’s canvases are gently lit, silent with a meditative quality. Their interpretations of affective forms clash, parallel, and converse with each other, prompting the question: How do distinct art practices grow out of and evolve from a close partnership? Last year, Daharsh’s first solo show at Picture Theory took place concurrently with Adamerovich’s solo exhibition at Timothy Taylor Gallery. In a conversation with IMPULSE, they discuss their inspirations, ideation processes, and the mutual, ongoing dialogues that nurture their work.
Xuezhu Jenny Wang: Both of you work with organic geometries permuted by different color arrangements. Where do you find your inspiration? And what does your ideation process look like?
Christopher Daharsh: Major inspirations for our work come from nature, man-made environments, and interior psychological landscapes. The patterns, colors, forms, and objects found in these environments are consistently spectacular. For me, ideation often comes through translation: I’ll use the photos we take of our surroundings as a basis for drawings, which morph into paintings and sculptures. I’ll slowly extrapolate elements and make them more focused, refined, and collated. I’ll also do rubbings of textures around our environment and collect objects (shells, bark, seed pods, bits of trash, etc) that make their way into the studio and create larger, mutated cast sculptures.
Alicia Adamerovich: Like a lot of artists, we both take a lot of inspiration from our external environments. We both need periods of time outside the studio to absorb and process before we can have anything to even think about in-studio. We both love the natural world . . . or what is left of it, as well as simply experiencing the humanity around us in the city. You have to live a little in order to express something worth connecting with. A lot of our ideation process involves just that—trying to have a somewhat normal and healthy life, as hard as that is to do in NYC.
Installation view of Alicia Adamerovich: Rude Awakening. Courtesy of the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery.
XJW: Together, you take excursions in the natural world, which often informs your aesthetic sensibilities. When did you start becoming interested in connecting with nature? What does nature mean to you, especially in today’s world with alarming climate crises and a significant portion of our lives taking place online?
CD: I’ve always enjoyed connecting to nature. I grew up in Nebraska, where access to nature was a given. As a child, my family and I visited nearby Colorado and Wyoming often and spent summers hiking, swimming, and driving around in the most beautiful of places. Since moving to New York, I’ve reconnected with nature through upstate outings, beaches, and public parks. Nature is both an escape from cramped and polluted city living, an antidote for online burnout, and ground zero for calamitous climate-driven changes. It represents, for me, a contradiction, a friction of elements, a beautiful and precarious environment. Alicia and I often like wandering trash-strewn beaches, desolate industrial neighborhoods, as well as idyllic forested Catskill hills. We enjoy taking in all the contrasts, the beauty, and the ugliness alike. Focusing on where these two worlds meet is important, as they are inextricably linked, for better or worse, and how we treat our environment really does matter. These meeting points often make their way into my work as anthropomorphic versions of natural and man-made situations, abstractions of reality that signal a connection to humanity.
AA: Like Chris, I was also raised with a deep connection to nature. I grew up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania, about an hour from Pittsburgh. My mom was a biologist, then a science teacher, and my dad worked for the state housing authority and did a lot of handiwork, building, and DIY stuff over the years (both now retired). I grew up on the cusp before computers fully integrated into our lives, so my childhood was mostly spent outdoors falling out of trees, swimming in the crick behind our house, and playing in the overgrown coke ovens scattered throughout the hillsides. The mountainous landscape there is beautiful, but it was always full of these relics from the coal and steel industry. It is so hard to find untouched nature anymore; I don’t know how much of it still exists. I definitely think that is something that I’m aware of in my own work: the natural meets the unnatural. That's kind of what separates humans from other life on earth: our ability to alter the natural state of things and disrupt so much evolution in such a short amount of time. Chris and I love visiting anywhere new whenever we can (within reason).
Christopher Daharsh, Hematite Tablature (2024). Oil on canvas, 54 × 84 inches. Photo by Todd Huffman. Courtesy of the artist.
XJW: I’d love to know more about how your partnership informs each of your practices. In what ways are you similar to or different from each other? What kinds of dialogue take place?
AA: This is something we are still learning about as the years go by. I think we started out with more complimentary tendencies than similarities. But over time, that is beginning to change since we are constantly learning things from each other.
CD: I tend to be good at day-to-day things. Alicia is great at big-picture stuff. These strengths filter into our studios and home life, balancing how we handle our personal lives and careers.
AA: Yes, our work/life has really just become one big life. In the studio we have different strengths as well that we lean on for support with different projects. Chris is great at materials and figuring out complex processes. Overall, he has much more patience than I do, and he helps me know when I need to slow down to prepare something before rushing into it.
CD: Alicia really excels in creating a larger vision and coming up with ways to aesthetically and conceptually tie works together, really making her own world. I’ve learned a lot from her way of working, which is at once meticulous and free-floating—going in and out of different materials and modes while keeping things grounded to her honed sensibilities and scrupulous worldview. We dialogue about our work every day, and are constantly lending an eye or a hand to each other's process.
Alicia Adamerovich, Blissful Ignorance (2024). Wood, aluminum, resin, dye, oil, sand, and pumice. 28.75 x 16 x 19 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
XJW: What’s your relationship to abstraction, respectively?
AA: I’ve been told my work visually falls between abstraction and representation, but I’m definitely approaching it from an abstraction perspective. I’m not telling a story or trying to depict any sort of identity, place, or thing through making. A lot of what I do is intuitive and building upon previous work. I could maybe say I’m working with emotions and my state of being at any given moment. I’m more interested in human conundrums and thinking about universal feelings and phenomena. I love hearing what people see in my work, and I think it's incredibly fascinating to learn about the links/differences in each reaction.
CD: My conversation with abstraction is ongoing: some works are more directly representative of relatable situations in nature, and some are more removed, with more layers of translation and mitigation between the experience, ideation, and final expressive product. All art is abstraction, and mine slides up and down the level of that spectrum, sometimes more closely depicting a full scene in nature, and sometimes depicting a more interior landscape, filled with joy, anxiety, fear, melancholy, etc. I like going back and forth between these modes, and while there are noticeable patterns, I generally want to avoid sticking to one certain style for all of my work. Different works call for different perspectives or tools to be used.
Christopher Daharsh, Somnambulant (2024). Aquaresin, dye, mild steel, resin, fiberglass, polyurethane, and enamel. 77 x 33 x 29 inches. Photo by Bradley Marshall. Courtesy of the artist.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
