Wade Schaming: Easy Feelings

Equity Gallery is pleased to present Easy Feelings, a body of new geometric colorfield paintings by Wade Schaming. Schaming’s fifth exhibition and first solo with Equity Gallery, the exhibition extends his broader sculptural practice of assemblage and personal archiving into painting. Through geometric restraint, repeated motifs and raw surfaces, these works explore memory, impermanence and the transformation of personal experience into systematic formal arrangements.

Schaming recounts the origins of the Easy Feelings paintings:

“Following a car accident in 1988, my mother slowly lost her mind. It began gradually, like rain—a shift in personality, almost imperceptible at first—until the woman who would sing songs, pack lunches and blow kisses was quietly supplanted. In her place was someone melancholic, someone rageful; a woman who hoarded. Our home, once warm and loving, began to overflow with detritus until the objects she collected consumed our shared spaces.

On weekends, I escaped to Century III Mall. Studying the building’s maps, I found solace in the bright red YOU ARE HERE markers and the careful precision of each line. They offered the promise of direction—of arrival somewhere else altogether. At a time when my emotions felt overwhelming, these maps gave me something steady, something navigable.

Visual art became my language when I had none. My early drawings carried the same meditative control as those maps: meticulous, ordered, deliberate. In direct contrast to the entropy of my home, marking paper became a way to impose order on confusion. Within that process, I began to find a voice. In art I found myself.

As my practice has blossomed, I’ve felt less bound by the systems I once relied on. In 2024, I began painting as a new way to commune with myself. Each work begins with a central form and expands outward, accumulating until the canvas is filled. They evoke both the beauty of organic growth and the unsettling spread of disease. Like my mother, I fill the space until I can’t, and the result can be both overwhelming and beautiful.

In my practice as in my life, I use these mediums to heal. Nothing is permanent. All time is borrowed. All we have is today.” —Wade Schaming