DAVID ADAMO
2012-12-31One part of Adamo’s conceptual stance is to question the meaningfulness of objects and the ways in which we come to understand them, through playfully transforming materials and subverting their intended use and more recently, by their amplifications and reduction.
David Adamo’s current work involves the transformation of objects from everyday culture such as bicycles, doors and musical instruments. By way of these transformations, Adamo not only subverts the object’s intended use, but also plays with their size and material. On the ground floor of the gallery, the artist has arranged a row of replica pencil erasers lined up on a long single shelf. These pencil erasers are made from clay and hand-painted so that they are indistinguishable from the real thing. Elsewhere a bicycle frame has been crafted out of wood, the rendering of a generic and practical object into a lavish but non-functioning one. This particular bicycle is taken from the design of Graeme Obree, which he called the “Old Faithful”, a radically designed bicycle which included parts from a washing machine. The original bicycle is displayed in the Riverside Transport Museum in Glasgow..
A thread running through Adamo’s practice is the narrative of the artist as a performer, as if the act of making is a staged and choreographed activity. The works in the show point to a fantastical narrative to what could have occurred previously or is about to happen in order for this arrangements of objects to have come about. In Untitled, a replica door of a typical European grand entrance-way is installed into the gallery wall, but it is brought down to 1:2 of the scale and the original more subtle tones of a Prussian street are replaced by a bright orange paint.
Opposite – Untitled, 2012
Exhibition runs through to January 12th, 2013
Ibid.
35 Hoxton Square
London
N1 6NN
