Holly Myers reviews the exhibition Lisa Adams: Second Life at CB1 Gallery, Los Angeles, on view through May 12, 2013.

Myers writes that "If painting can be said to live at the threshold between the external visual world of objects and the internal visual world of the imagination, the relative pull of either pole varies widely from artist to artist." In Adams recent paintings, Myers continues, "the tug of war is palpable… It is not a shift from representation to abstraction — Adams has always moved between the two — so much as the loosening of a hold on representational objects, with all their advantages and limitations, and a self-conscious embrace of the more nebulous terms of imaginative space."