Artist StatementMy figurative work is largely autobiographical, functioning as personal memoir. It is a visual formulation of my inner response to life and the world, spiraling through recurring social themes of identity, love, and desire. Based on personal histories, some might say the work navigates between public confession and a private form of entertainment. My artistic inclinations have led me to the solitary processes of drawing and painting, and the strategy of figuration. Media forms such as these, embodying the trace of touch and sensual materiality, seem suitable conveyers of desire and loss. I use my characters to probe contemporary notions of identity. They're rather like portrait projections fashioned out of borrowed imagery reminiscent of cinematic culture of the 1950s and 60s, other paintings, photos, or vintage books. I construct them to consciously mirror cinematic effects—its projective nature, image-flow, use of montage, and celebrity personae—as a way to insinuate a complication or disturbance. Increasingly their intrusion or mediation affect a redressing of the figural form. From the pinknblue series, rhead (2001) provides an example where scale shifts mix with art references and mimic cinematic montage to create a fractured figure. Misfitted men (2003-2005), a later series, proposes the portrait dispersed across a time-line. The body as multiplicity is mobilized. Feigning coherency, it exhibits conditions of flux, transience, or transformation. In a digital age where immediate access to knowledge equals power, media commerce provide its audience with the rapid dissemination and over-accumulation of current information. As a result, language becomes marginalized, and any expression, as Norman Bryson states, can easily seem after-the-fact (Desire and Tradition: From David to Delacroix, 1984). For the figurative painter living under these conditions, the weight of art history can be particularly overwhelming. Appropriation then becomes the antidote for a perceived condition of belatedness. The key, if your abilities can take you there, is not to avoid history, but to press yourself into it and make room. Jamie Adams (2010) |