Positions | Adam Gordon
Adam Gordon’s multi-disciplinary practice centers on the framing of personal experience. Shifting between totalizing installations, constructed encounters, video, and photo-realistic paintings, his work trains our attention toward everyday existence.
Building upon these experiential frameworks, Gordon’s presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach focuses on the total transformation of the booth into a large-scale vitrine. A framed Plexiglas plane delineates this site-specific installation from the main fair, acting as both obstruction and membrane.
Barred from entry, the viewer’s encounter with this environment occupies the position of both observer and passerby. Engagement with the work becomes an act of forced voyeurism, as one’s attentive viewing internalizes a sense of obscurity. Illuminated solely by its exterior surroundings, the interior space emerges slowly to reveal a strategic ambience, carefully strewn with debris and latent with an intangible dampness.
The mundane quality of the space piques the viewer’s expectation of some action, never fully realized or resolved, assumed by the precise staging of the enclosed environment. Anticipation hangs about the space like a residue: the event is the unknown, the very act of attention towards the void.
Through these minimal gestures, Gordon heightens one’s perception of the banal and with it, the everyday quality of existence. This is further echoed by the work’s performative element, in which an anonymous woman in her 40s intermittently wanders the fair in close proximity to the vitrine. While tied to the physical space, her tangible presence and person are moot. It is the echo of her existence, which imbues the work with a potential passing: a moment of which we all partake.
Adam Gordon (b.1986 New York, NY) received his MFA from Yale University in 2011. Gordon has had solo exhibitions at Chapter NY; New York and Hunter/Whitfield; London. Gordon’s work has been included in group exhibition at New Galerie, Paris; Andrew Kreps, NY; National Exemplar, NY; Boatos Fine Arts, São Paulo; and Night Gallery, LA. He will have a solo show at Galleria ZERO in 2018.