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My World in the Details of Place by Adam Brown
Dates: August 22, 2017 – March 29, 2018
Events: Reception: November 2 at 5:00-8:00 pm
Artist Statement
My World in the Details of Place
What compels me to look under rocks, along seams and cracks and at ripples of time-eroded plaster? I photograph details of place that reveal something essential to me – through the marks created over time.
In Nara, the ancient Japanese capital in Kansai Province, I felt a pull. A force on me that was gravitational. It would not let me go. I did not want to leave that place. I had something to find out there.
The Parque Mexico pool also drew me in. Gazing into its layers and reflections, the layers of blues drew me in. I click, I respond. Perhaps not even seeing all there is to see until the final print is made…
I make marks with my camera as I wander, using the device like a film camera. Recording slight shifts in light. Examining angles. Looking up. Down. Close. Closer. I respond to the the lively changes unfolding before my eyes – deposited there over time.
The air is still. The water drips. The wind whispers. The past voices sing.
While most folks are looking over there at icons of culture and meaning, I find myself crouched down on my hands and knees inspecting marks on a dirty wall. The marks of time sing their stories to me and I record them.
What happens next is that those marks are scaled-up in the enlarged print. The context shifts. That record of the place reads like an impression, part landscape – part abstraction. One is not always sure what one is looking at. Is it arial shot? It is a drawing? A rubbing? Are those footprints? Or is it calligraphy? What layer of reality am I experiencing?
I like this level of ambiguity when the eye reads the image one way and the mind wonders: What am looking at?
Adam Brown
New York City 2017
Artist Background
Welcome to the world of photographic art of Adam Brown, a New York City-based artist.
To label Adam’s work ‘photographic’ perhaps doesn’t do his art justice. His work is more often shown in a wider fine art-context – not only in photography galleries or venues.
The recent bodies of work are abstract, not immediately read as photographs at all. You see layers of experience captured by the camera, yet rendered in a painterly fashion. There is a hand-drawn quality in the work. A sense of mystery and ambiguity. You may ask yourself: What is it that I am looking at?
This is a quality Adam likes to enhance in his work. He relishes in the multi-interpretational aspect of the work. At first, it maybe recognized as landscape. Next, you may see faces, animals, fantasy forms. It becomes a drawing, a painting, an impressionist rendering of mysterious proportions. It all comes from taking the recorded details out of context and allowing the images of markings and layers of reflections to become the thing itself.
Adam has a Bachelor’s degree from Tyler School of Art and a Master’s of Fine Art from NYU in photography. He has primarily used landscape images in his work for the past ten years. Sometimes as stand-alone landscapes, sometimes collaging images together to form a new landscape and, more recently, taking the landscape image to a level of pure abstraction. There is always a reference to place in his work.
Adam started regularly showing his work in 2011 at SOFA Chicago and New York, Palm Beach Art & Design Fair and more recently at the Houston Art Fair, Aspen Art & Design fair and Art Market & design in Bridgehampton. This year, Adam will show again at SOFA Chicago and at The Palm Springs Art Fair. This is his first time showing during the Louisville Photo Biennial festival.