About the Artist
Adam Chapman grew up on O’ahu, just outside of Honolulu, Hawaii. He now makes his home in Brooklyn, New York, and is an adjunct professor in the Communication, Design, and Technology department at Parsons, the New School for Design in New York.
He has shown internationally at museums and galleries including: Pilar and Joan Miro Foundation, Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain; DeCordova
Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Triennale der Photographie Hamburg, Germany; American Museum of the Moving Image, Long Island City, New York; Whitney Artport (on-line); SKL Gallery, Illes Balears, Spain; and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, California. Chapman has been a visiting artist at the American Academy, Rome, Italy; MacDowell Colony, Petersborough, New Hampshire; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Snowmass Village, Colorado; California State Fullerton’s Grand Central Arts Center, Santa Ana, California; Banff Center for the Arts, Banff, Alberta, Canada; and 911 Media Arts, Seattle, Washington.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Illuminations: Adam Chapman
October 2, 2008-February 22, 2009
Illuminations features five technology-based works
by Brooklyn artist Adam Chapman. The artist uses videos, DVDs, projectors, and computers to generate and present art illuminating his fascination with birds, nature, language, and patterns. Using digital technology, Chapman modernizes traditional drawing and collage techniques. He challenges viewers to look closely at themselves and the world around them, to perhaps pay attention to things that they have taken for granted: for instance, the migratory pattern of common Grey Gulls or the dance-like movement of invasive Starlings.
The exhibition begins with a mirror in which fragmented images of gallery visitors are produced within a single image to form a Cubist-style self-portrait. Also on view are two sets of images—one set comprised of fifteen pieces and the other, fifty—which are framed similar to traditional drawings. However, Chapman utilizes generative videos and monitors to form his dynamically fluid kinetic water color and graphite-like drawings.
A large video project in which Chapman spliced together different images and dialogue from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope is projected in the exhibition. Exploring the formal aspects of film, Chapman deconstructed an existing movie and reassembled it into a new work so that the entire movie is viewed in the span of five minutes and presents a completely different theme. A generative video installation is projected onto the ceiling in the back half of Kidspace where birds fly about in a natural manner, periodically converging to form letters slowly spelling out poems from the Manyoshu, which are eighth-century Japanese poems.
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