Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Adam Fuss, from November 3 through December 30, 2005.
For over twenty years, British-born artist Adam Fuss has reconsidered the devices traditionally utilized in the pursuit of making a photograph. His most recent series, entitled Ark, recovers the 19th century daguerreotype process to create his photograms. In this process, Fuss creates his images on polished copper plates after being exposed to mercury and chemical vapors. With his photogram work Fuss draws upon one of the early photographic traditions used by such pioneers as William Henry Fox Talbot. Adam Fuss has combined the two primal photographic processes of daguerreotype and photogram to achieve a 21st century end. In this way, Fuss subverts the primacy of the camera and celebrates the print as an independent object. By its very nature, the daguerreotype captures an aspect of reality often inaccessible by more traditional means. This series marks a culmination in Fuss’s investigation of these alternative photographic methods.
Adam Fuss’s dozen photograms included in the show each define a unique moment. Made over a limited period of time, the artist recorded the successive effects on a pool transformed by a droplet of water. Each varying image of induced ripples created through this process comes to exemplify a transcendental moment. Fuss’s waves expand infinitely. These waves embody a metaphorical moment that contains all life. Fuss’s series is defined by the ephemeral, each moment marking a fleeting revelation. Fuss’s large snake powder photograms also included in the show compliment the Ark series. These large-scale works offer a sense of the infinite movement and creative energy of life. One senses in Fuss’s work that he does not try to manipulate these subjects that are, by their nature, ambiguous. Rather, he resolves himself to their inherent mystery. This is largely accomplished through Fuss’s photographic method that hinges on chance occurrence.
Adam Fuss was the subject of a solo retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany in 2002-2003. His photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among many other public institutions.
Adam Fuss is presented concurrently with the exhibition Lee Friedlander: Apples and Olives.
