“Into the Night Land” by Adam Gabriel Winnie is on view at eyedrum Gallery through August 3. (Photos courtesy of eyedrum Gallery)
Atlanta-based artist Adam Gabriel Winnie’s Into the Night Land (at eyedrum through August 3) draws viewers into a vividly imagined underworld. Mythic, psychological and deeply atmospheric, the show invites quiet engagement and openness to mystery.
A 2023 MFA graduate of Georgia State University and BFA graduate of SCAD, Winnie works in painting, sculpture, video and sound. This is the third show in a trilogy, including Into That Resonant Dark (GSU, 2023) and Chthonic Passage (Whitespace, 2024), that delves into the intersections of landscape, psyche and myth. This exhibition showcases his distinctive visual language through large-scale oil paintings defined by radical tonal restraint.
Nine new paintings, each rendered in a strikingly narrow palette of crimson and deep green, dominate the gallery space. This seemingly limited chromatic choice, however, belies the canvases’ rich visual and emotional depth. Through meticulous layering and glazing, Winnie conjures precise, dreamlike forms that gradually resolve from abstract crimson daubs on dark grounds into near-photographic vistas.
A standout is the titular painting, Into the Night Land, which depicts a male figure alone in a barren, uncanny landscape. The figure appears stripped bare and defeated — physically and emotionally — fragile, exposed and in quiet confrontation with the vast unknown. Executed with disciplined technique, its power stems from an atmospheric mystery, aching solitude and an imagined world realized in near-hallucinatory detail.
Equally haunting are two landscape paintings, a diptych titled Sentinels of Cloudland, which conjure liminal terrain devoid of human presence. Based on the very real but extraordinary landscape of Cloudland Canyon in Northwest Georgia, they balance clarity and specificity with ambiguity and mystery. Forgotten Passage and Hazel Hollow, similarly inspired by Georgia’s remote Pettyjohn karst cave, create an illusion of gazing into a hollow passage in the Earth — evocative of memory, loss and descent, a different, deeper, lonelier stop on the same mythic journey.
Not all pieces resonate with the same force. The Self as Monad (The vulgar eye will here be blind and most distrustful) leans too heavily on overt reference; the robed figure and orb evoke mystical or philosophical weight, but the image lacks the emotional openness and impact found elsewhere. Likewise, Sceach Gheal (hawthorn), with its dense associations of a barren hawthorn tree, feels constrained by fixed symbolism, offering less room for personal interpretation.
Anchoring the exhibition is a sculptural installation titled Oracle of Inner Experience. A black reflective pool filled with dark ink suspends a lifeless beech tree — eerily still and preserved in epoxy resin. The scene suggests a ritual site, its starkness and silence powerfully encapsulating the show’s central themes of descent and the threshold between inner and outer worlds.
Ambient sound and scent further immerse visitors in the small gallery’s atmosphere. A four-hour audio composition, Black Box V.2, mixes natural recordings with ghostly wartime number broadcasts, creating a sonic environment suspended between presence and absence. The room is also subtly infused with geosmin, the earthy, evocative scent of rain-soaked soil.
Ultimately, Into the Night Land resists easy resolutions or tidy narratives, instead opening a space for ambiguity, introspection and emotional resonance. Its strength lies not only in symbolic depth but in Winnie’s masterful painterly technique, the surreal yet precisely rendered dreamlike landscapes and the hauntingly unique crimson-and-green palette that suffuses the work with an otherworldly presence. For viewers willing to engage with its brooding stillness, the show is a rewarding and memorable descent into the underworld — where myth, memory and the boundary between the known and unknown intertwine.
Winnie will give an artist talk on Saturday, August 3, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at eyedrum, an opportunity to hear directly from the artist about the ideas and processes behind the new work. Into the Night Land will remain on view at eyedrum through August 3.
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Andrew Alexander is an Atlanta-based writer.
