Derrick Adams is one of the artists in ‘Go Stand Next to the Mountain’ in the Hales Gallery in London, from, November 28 until January 24 2015.
Go Stand Next to the Mountains, 2010 (video still).
About the artist:
Derrick Adams (b. Baltimore, MD, USA) is a New-York based multidisciplinary artist working in performance, sculpture, collage and painting. Adams received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Pratt Institute and is a Skowhegan and Marie Walsh Sharpe alumnus. He is a recipient of a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and is an honoured finalist for the 2011 William H. Johnson Prize.
American Gothic, 2013.
Exhibition and performance highlights include: MoMA PS1 Greater New York 2005, PERFORMA 05, Brooklyn Museum Open House, The Kitchen NYC 2010, The Bearden Project at the Studio Museum in Harlem 2011/12, a four-night solo performance in BAM’s new Fisher Theatre in September 2012, PERFORMA 2013.
The main focus of Adam’s practice lies on fragmentation and manipulation of structure and surface – exploring shape-shifting forces of popular culture and its counter balances in our lives. His creative process is invested in ideas charging formal constructs working in 2D, 3D and performative realms.
Modern Living, 2013.
Adams is continuously inspired by iconography of American culture and television programming as well as architecture and its relationship to Man in a contemporary context. His collages and sculpture create geometric constructions of angular human figures that seemingly live both in a state of deconstruction at the same time as if in the process of being built. This geometry is often drawn from floor plans, visual renderings, architectural drawings and serves the purpose of investigating into the physical construction of the figure.
Adams lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Still Life, 2013.
About Go Stand Next to the Mountain:
Derrick Adams | Elijah Burgher | Howardena Pindell | Hunter Reynolds | Jacolby Satterwhite | Carolee Schneemann | David Wojnarowicz
Hales Gallery is delighted to announce Go Stand Next to the Mountain an exhibition of seven artists whose works examine a personal ‘lived experience’ or Phenomenology: the study and interpretation of structures, events and objects in one’s consciousness and life. The title of the exhibition, Go Stand Next to the Mountain is taken from artist Derrick Adam’s piece of the same title. Approaching ‘mountain’ as a visual metaphor for a greater society, we are invited to engage with ideas of social consciousness, placement and perception.
Three Generations, 2013.
For these seven artists the often reflective process of observation is carried out through the use of a mediator, filter or framework – whether that be an examination of the artist’s life, their medium, alter-ego or even constructed fictive environments-and often underlines or exposes the discrepancies between their individual reality and the one maintained within society. How do we choose to portray and live out our personal identity within a society that is composed of conventions often limiting the human existence to a set of preconceived structures and activities? Is one’s identity and experience inseparable from a larger collective group?
One focus of the exhibition entails looking at the portrayal of the ‘self’ within a society. Through the use of generated realities and ‘alter egos’, some of the exhibiting artists examine the process of manipulating and distorting one’s identity in order to either belong or rebel against the collective group. The ‘alter-egos’ who speak for the artist often reflect the inadequacies of our contemporary society and allow the viewer to project their own shared experiences onto the work.
Worship, 2012.
For other artists, gender, race and sexuality are defining issues that arise within their examination of identity. These characteristics often lead to an individual or collective group experiencing denial, isolation or ostracization from society. The artists’ medium of choice acts as a space where they explore or question these issues thus, the artwork is being used as a vessel to encapsulate an experience.