Mezzanine Gallery

AIRPLAY

By Adria Arch

Through colorfully painted, suspended sculptures, Adria Arch creates a joyful celebration of life and the human spirit. Her work explores the interplay of pattern and void, positive and negative space. Color and form create rhythms that energize. Negative spaces transform emptiness into an active element. This dynamic reflects how we are all connected in space and time, influenced by and relying on each other to thrive.

While her forms often echo natural and floral shapes, they deliberately play with and subvert traditionally ‘feminine’ imagery. Arch takes these stereotypically gendered organic shapes and renders them monumental, unavoidable, and slightly alien. Sinuous lines and flower-like forms are exaggerated and transformed into something ambiguous and challenging—even unsettling. These forms don’t politely decorate; they command space and demand engagement.

Early training in dance continues to influence how Arch thinks about space, movement, and the body’s relationship to its environment. Each installation becomes a choreographed environment where forms perform in space, creating experiences that unfold as viewers move through them. The suspended pieces engage in a slow dance with gravity, while their shadows cast an ever-changing performance on the walls. Hanging from wires, the sculptures inhabit the empty space above our heads, conveying joyfulness and rhythm. Through abstraction and our shared visual language, Arch expresses emotions that all can experience and understand.

Adria Arch is an Arlington-based artist. She has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sanskriti Foundation in Delhi, and in Auvillar, France. Her work is included in collections at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fidelity Corporation, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Recent honors include an upcoming show at the San Luis Obispo Art Museum in California and the purchase of an installation for Google, Kendall Square in Boston. She has exhibited at numerous venues throughout the Northeast including Boston Sculptors Gallery, Brattleboro Art Museum, Danforth Art Museum, Cahoon Museum of American Art, and Fitchburg Art Museum.

This exhibition is organized by Galleries and Exhibitions Manager, Mariana Rey in dialogue with the artist. To learn more about the artist please visit www.adriaarch.com.