Born: 1950, Columbus, OH
Resides: Vashon Island, WA

"Victoria Adams' dreamy landscape paintings appear realistic but in fact are idealized inventions spun from memory, art history, photography, and desire.

Adams makes up ideal places that look vaguely Midwestern, with big skies and flat horizons that stretch into infinite perfect peace. These made-up paradises reenergize the landscape genre, not by copying nature more faithfully but by remembering it more passionately. The land Adams paints is mostly gone, or changed; the work possesses the wistful nostalgia of a tearful eulogy, honoring what is past but taking solace in the fact that it existed at all.

Adams offers a composite view of beauty, nature as it should be, rather than a haphazard record of the real. It is a practice in the tradition of most of art history, showing us not what is but what should be, nature perfected by art.

If these older traditions used beauty as a metaphor for morality, though, Adams presents her serenely gorgeous views as a concrete reminder that nature's dominating silence and scale is our real world, not just a pretty backdrop. We may abuse it, ignore and ruin it, yet still it rules us. That's why the main character in her work is never a monument or a particular view but weather itself.

By recalling an era in natural history when the earth was less trampled, Adams both comforts and chastens the viewer. Here is what we had and might yet have, she seems to say, and in doing so dares us to believe it is possible to restore it and thereby restore ourselves."

--Margaret Hawkins, December, 2005