Red Around Gray Statement
May 7-June 6

Red Around Gray features a collection of gray, energetic, layered paintings with a jagged red border accompanied by one sculpture piece stationed at the center of the room. According to instructions placed on a red tented card, viewers are invited to interact with the piece.

Un-clean Skin Drawing Shop (2026) positions the viewer in front of a flash binder and a light gray quill that resembles the shape and weight of a life-size tattoo gun. The binder labeled “Available Tattoo Flash” copies and questions a common tattoo shop practice: selling repeatable designs that reinforce mainstream American aesthetics and stereotypes, meeting class-based ideas of what looks “clean” while leaving little room for individuality. Instead of repeatable designs, the binder contains original drawings with short, honest, and earnest notes that describe them, seemingly meaningless and superficial. By spontaneously using the bulky quill (tattoo gun imitation) without a planned stencil to guide slow perfection, guests practice imagining the act of tattooing outside of the traditional convictions to better appreciate the spontaneous mark. This experience helps the viewer better engage with the energetic paintings.

Subsequent to the artist's previous exhibition titled Red on Gray (2025), this exhibition uses similar color strategies and associations to draw the viewer away from red and toward gray. In America, we see red as an expensive and indulgent pleasure when red is placed in our gloomy gray streets. Red Around Gray poses an opposite effect where red is framed around gray. This technique creates a spotlight effect on the subtleties of gray and the hidden transgressive worlds that happen outside of what is loudly advertised with red. The titles of the three large-scale paintings describe the reference imagery that formed the energetic nuance of the grey central mass of mess. Absurd…

Scrolling, Memory of Page 24, Page 38, and Page 42 (Triptych, 2026) included simplified shapes and colors from the neighboring pieces. Black rectangles at the top and bottom of the canvas resemble a doomscrolling screen. By reducing the show to simple colors and shapes that mimic trivial digital scrolling, viewers are reminded how easily society’s unconventional grays fade back into hiding.

Adiah Bonham (byadiah) was born and raised in Upper Arlington, Ohio, and received a BFA with a concentration in painting from Kent State University. She currently maintains an art practice in Columbus, Ohio, at Millworks Art Studios.

In the Month of March, Blockfort Gallery B hosts "Red on Gray". The exhibition is a showcase of new works by painter Adiah Bonham. The show features large format paintings with deep and mood driven imagery. The work evokes discussion about how the environment and marketing around the artists affect her growth and wellbeing. More from the artist:

"These began as a space for me to accumulate layers. These layers depict morphing human figure as evidence of change on the canvas with quick grey marks. Exploring the grey around me, I started to notice just how frequent cadmium red is used in contrast to the gloomy grey streets of Columbus. Granted, grey does make the color beautiful and appealing. I enjoy how layering a painting feels like what I imagine a wealthy CEO feels when looking at their bank account: a big money number. (Despite how the painted layers are evident of mistakes underneath). In these paintings I sell myself my own evidence of change with the same marketing tactics of the Columbus Ohio businesses and ads around me to reclaim control of the desire that these two colors evoke. "

Adiah is a recent graduate of the Kent State University who maintains her current practice out of Millworks Art Studios. To see more of her work, visit this link.

The Crepuscular and No Doubt Falsified and Mutilated Memory explores the decay of
Western traditions of representation. A quote from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge
Luis Borges, the title refers to a society that allows its history to be slowly overwritten,
fundamentally altering the material fabric of its reality. The exhibition overlaps our digital
culture – characterized by algorithmic production and computational grids – with
historical painterly frameworks, like the fractured geometry of a post-Cézanne
landscape or a Francis Bacon body under pressure. These overlapping, inherited visual
systems strain each other as their promises of access to direct experience reveal a
Borgesian condition of self-referential loops and maze-like structures.
The exhibit confronts the digital integration of contemporary life, as a structuring force of
authority – confronting the algorithmic mandate that now acts as a gatekeeper of truth.
Paint is used to pressure the floating world of digital abstraction and grounding it to the
material, what can be verified directly. As existential fear of Ai workplace displacement
mount, alongside the intrusion of data centers on local towns, these digital systems
increasingly reveal undeniable material consequence. The work on view attempts to
give form to this friction. Recalling Deleuze, the methodology suggests that a visual
"catastrophe" on the canvas is required to violently break the cliché and untangle these
systems from our humanity.
Andrew Roberts-Gray brings the digital and the landscape into direct conversation,
treating both as weathered, bodily experiences. Reminiscent of old frescos, his
landscapes describe an expanse and simultaneously record its deterioration –
highlighting our capacity to recognize a form even in its decay. Atop, a geometric grid
based on the original 1983 Intel Processor schematic is overlayed. This grid confines or
compresses the underlying space, at once recalling the conceptual colonization of
physical land -- such as the legal imposition of private property – while documenting a
physical pressure from the digital. The two systems of perception, circuit logic and
landscape painting, interfere and complicate their respective abstractions.
Adiah Bonham pulls from cultural refuse: pin-up imagery, tattoo flash, meme
methodologies, and the angst of Abstract Expressionism. Pulling from the grey, fleshy
weight of a painterly Soutine or Bacon language, the work invests itself in ephemera,
providing a tension that is intentionally self-defeating by using a visual vocabulary no
longer in fashion. The work struggles against the futility of finding meaning within our
current a digital condition; as the industrial productions of cliché in meme culture prove
impossible for a modernist framework to overcome. Instead, the images revel in the
culturally abject. A self-portrait featuring a boxy, 1980’s corporate suit speaks to the
defunct formal qualities of institutional power. As an anti-fantasy, it recalls an austere,
patriarchal model to undermine the contemporary formal forces. The work gravitates
around the fundamental ambivalence of online spaces, as tonal shifts, cultural debris
and an unstable moral position is put under the rigorous scrutiny of paint.
The Crepuscular and No Doubt Falsified and Mutilated Memory explores the landscape
and a body burdened by digital architecture. It examines how visceral painterly
sensation can undermine the authority of our undemocratically elected technological
systems.

Inside the Making of the Series
Although Red on Gray has been Bonham's focus for the past four months, the finished series extends themes consistent throughout her young career. A term from her 2025 thesis at Kent State University, "Gooey America," is her moniker for stripping away money and social standards to expose the absurdity of everyday actions. Between canvas works, she has been painting and pasting over magazines and ads, creating densely layered compositions that transform cultural "nonsense" into "goo," inviting viewers to see the falsehoods of marketing dissolved through a satirical lens.

"worlds in uneasy coexistence"

Her work outside of the studio also connects to the philosophies behind Red on Gray. Over the past three years, she has sent friends and family contrived Christmas portraits, posed with strangers at the mall, staged engagement announcements, and fabricated narratives to practice the commercial and performative traditions of heteronormative bliss. Although her relationship is authentic, as she cohabitates with her partner, the scenarios are deliberately exaggerated, exposing how easily it can all be staged and circulated.
Ultimately, through Red on Gray, Bonham does not offer a moralistic rejection of the concrete or the material. Instead, she reveals how inseparable they have become. Red on Gray holds both worlds in uneasy coexistence, suggesting we are bodies in motion and images in frames, concrete and screen glow, gray and red.

Red on Gray is exhibiting Saturday, March 7, 2026 - Monday, March 30, 2026 at Blocfort Gallery at 162 North Sixth Street, Columbus, Ohio 43215.
Adiah Bonham is a 2025 graduate of Kent State University and is based at Millworks Art Studios. To see more of her work, visit www.byadiah.com and Instagram @byadiah.

The Crepuscular and No Doubt Falsified and Mutilated Memory explores the decay of
Western traditions of representation. A quote from Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Jorge
Luis Borges, the title refers to a society that allows its history to be slowly overwritten,
fundamentally altering the material fabric of its reality. The exhibition overlaps our digital
culture – characterized by algorithmic production and computational grids – with
historical painterly frameworks, like the fractured geometry of a post-Cézanne
landscape or a Francis Bacon body under pressure. These overlapping, inherited visual
systems strain each other as their promises of access to direct experience reveal a
Borgesian condition of self-referential loops and maze-like structures.
The exhibit confronts the digital integration of contemporary life, as a structuring force of
authority – confronting the algorithmic mandate that now acts as a gatekeeper of truth.
Paint is used to pressure the floating world of digital abstraction and grounding it to the
material, what can be verified directly. As existential fear of Ai workplace displacement
mount, alongside the intrusion of data centers on local towns, these digital systems
increasingly reveal undeniable material consequence. The work on view attempts to
give form to this friction. Recalling Deleuze, the methodology suggests that a visual
"catastrophe" on the canvas is required to violently break the cliché and untangle these
systems from our humanity.
Andrew Roberts-Gray brings the digital and the landscape into direct conversation,
treating both as weathered, bodily experiences. Reminiscent of old frescos, his
landscapes describe an expanse and simultaneously record its deterioration –
highlighting our capacity to recognize a form even in its decay. Atop, a geometric grid
based on the original 1983 Intel Processor schematic is overlayed. This grid confines or
compresses the underlying space, at once recalling the conceptual colonization of
physical land -- such as the legal imposition of private property – while documenting a
physical pressure from the digital. The two systems of perception, circuit logic and
landscape painting, interfere and complicate their respective abstractions.
Adiah Bonham pulls from cultural refuse: pin-up imagery, tattoo flash, meme
methodologies, and the angst of Abstract Expressionism. Pulling from the grey, fleshy
weight of a painterly Soutine or Bacon language, the work invests itself in ephemera,
providing a tension that is intentionally self-defeating by using a visual vocabulary no
longer in fashion. The work struggles against the futility of finding meaning within our
current a digital condition; as the industrial productions of cliché in meme culture prove
impossible for a modernist framework to overcome. Instead, the images revel in the
culturally abject. A self-portrait featuring a boxy, 1980’s corporate suit speaks to the
defunct formal qualities of institutional power. As an anti-fantasy, it recalls an austere,
patriarchal model to undermine the contemporary formal forces. The work gravitates
around the fundamental ambivalence of online spaces, as tonal shifts, cultural debris
and an unstable moral position is put under the rigorous scrutiny of paint.
The Crepuscular and No Doubt Falsified and Mutilated Memory explores the landscape
and a body burdened by digital architecture. It examines how visceral painterly
sensation can undermine the authority of our undemocratically elected technological
systems.