Interview

David Adamo is an American artist (born 1979, Rochester, New York) who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Primarily a sculptor, he engages with form and materiality, working with wood, plaster, bronze, and other materials to create installations that are both performative and formal in their arrangement.

A process of slow removal is central to Adamo’s sculpture. Objects from everyday life take on new forms, revealed by their remains: the fruit after it has been bitten, the balloon after the air has run out. The same is true of Adamo’s wood works—the eventual forms have emerged through the reduction of material.

For his fifth solo exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc., a single unlaced shoe sits on steps leading nowhere and miniature doors set into the wall create entrances for small spaces in the installation. Adamo has peeled away the layers of 108 canes, chipping away until they are brittle and useless. The repetition of their spindly forms is offset by the pools of shavings the artist has left behind, exposing his progress in piles of negative material. A scenario is created in which the viewer feels they have just missed on out some action, trailing a sense of something unfinished…

His drawings are made ambidextrously, a practice which he relates to drumming. He describes working line by line, finding a rhythm and pace, and arriving naturally at a wave-like pattern.

David Adamo is on view at Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, through 22 July 2022.

Agustina Woodgate (1981, Argentina) practice focuses on the politics of landscapes and infrastructures as a conceptual and public geography. She recombines, activates and repurposes available resources while setting alternative systems in motion. Woodgates’ approach is speculative, practical, and site and context-responsive, presenting critical possibilities to concepts on social orders, resource management and information distribution bringing clarity, scale, and accessibility.

In 2011 she co-founded radioee.net a nomadic, translingual, online radio station. In 2015 she co-founded TVGOV, a media company providing ecological data visualization. And in 2018 she co-initiated PUB, an experimental publishing platform within Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.

She is currently a tutor at the Disarming Design Master Program at Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam and is actively teaching workshops in several universities and organizations.

Her projects have been commissioned by BIENALSUR 2021, 2019 Whitney Biennial, 4th Istanbul Design Biennial; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; 9th Berlin Biennial; Peabody Essex Museum, MA; Bienal de las Américas, CO; ArtPort, Tel Aviv; PlayPublik, Poland; DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Washington; The Bass Museum of Art, FL; Storefront for Art and Architecture, MN and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin amongst others.

Brooklyn-based painter Tim Kent depicts psychotically charged interiors and unsettling dreamlike-vistas. In Kent’s painting, architecture and landscape are fused with gestural brush marks and elements of abstraction, but the picture plane is never flattened. Rather, the viewer is drawn into a deep space enhanced by Kent’s characteristic, symbolic perspectival grid lines. A reference to the Renaissance system used for constructing pictorial space, Kent’s perspectival lines evoke contemporary technological, mechanical and social systems such as electric grids, building elevation lines, internet networks, social networks, the flow of politics and information, and displays of power.

The artist’s imagery has evolved over the course of several bodies of work including A World After Its Own Image (2016) Dark Pools and Data Lakes (2018) and Enfilade (2020).  Kent describes his paintings as sometimes “stemming from a reaction to an event or moment from my life or the world, which I then use as the basis for my work.”  In other instances, his compositions “refer back to my own archive, whether photographs I’ve taken or found, or an image from an earlier work that continues to attract me psychologically or aesthetically. As Kent develops a painting, “the subject moves into focus, usually revealing some form of juxtaposition or conflict which serves as the basis for a larger body of work. Certain themes recur, historical narratives as cultural capital, or the interiors of stately architecture as artifact and landscapes modified by industry.”  

Heidi Hahn (b. 1982) was born in Los Angeles, CA and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Hahn received her M.F.A. from Yale University in 2014, and has been the recipient of several awards, residencies, and fellowships, including the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Residency, Jerome Foundation Grant, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Residency, Madison, ME; and the Fine Arts Work Center Residency, Provincetown, MA, among others.

Her work has been collected by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France; Saastamoinen Foundation Art Collection, Helsinki, Finland; and New Century Art Foundation, Shanghai, China; in addition to being exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the world including the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, KS; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; and Premier Regard, Paris, France.