Church, having published a novel with George Braziller and contributed to the international success of the band Mogwai, with her painting for the album cover Mr. Beast, is already a prodigious talent. Church’s art breaches the line of graphic illustration, ceramic craftsmanship and soulful poetry. On display for the explorative and duly titled Adults Make Kids are fully developed novellas from her painted and glazed ceramic tiles as well as her lovely pencil drawings.

Adults Make Kids consists of a three-part presentation. Large-scale works of painted tiles taken from her adult graphic novels The Book of Orphee, and The Dogs of Mexico, depict poignant human interactions rooted with mythological symbolism. In contrast, her original drawings from An Alphabet for Lonely Children (George Braziller, 2005), model sad, awkward children lyrically dressed up in animal costumes ranging from an elephant to a yak. Bridging the gap are single tiles from her Dogs of Mexico novel depicting scenes of humans morphing into dogs, lending a figurative and graceful entry to and from the innocent to adult aspect in of her work. Together, the work is a complete exploration into Church’s deliberate use of illustrative narrative as the focus of her art, provoking an intuitive interaction between, artist, story, and viewer.

The intermingling of humor and sadness coupled with the intricacy of childhood imagination reflect the influence of underground comic book artist Robert Crumb’s seditious views of the American mainstream. Adults Make Kids open’s the audience’s potential interpretation of the work by acknowledging that art, as in life, is not always linear or easily defined, just as the definitions and assumptions of what is `grown-up’ and what is `child-like’ are often renegotiated throughout one’s lifetime.