Adam Belt "Through the Rabbit Hole"
Franklin Parrasch Gallery
This event has ended.
With an early history of landscape painting inspired by the openness of the American west, prodigiously on display in his home state of New Mexico, Adam Belt’s latest efforts expand on that sort of disturbing expansiveness and magnify it into an unprecedented sphere encompassing both the immeasurably large and the infinitesimally small. Those further reaches in these literally out-of-the world vistas render the hugeness of traditional big sky regions puny in comparison, as both the natural world and the mind’s perception of it are engaged by works that allude to reaching back nearly to the big bang on one hand and the tiniest elemental foundations of matter on the other. Making the evanescent perceptible but still mysterious, Through the Rabbit Hole includes two pieces cut into the wall of the darkened gallery, their edge flush with the vertical surface, penetrating and disappearing into the structure of the building itself. In Down the Rabbit Hole, multiple mirrors create a funnel, a tunnel, a vortex of never-ending sequential reflections, but possibly it’s also the depths of a particle accelerator. Both are incomprehensible and sublime, in equal measure, brought inside as models that reflect natural forces coursing through the universe. Through the Looking Glass is likewise a hole to nowhere with a cylindrical rod in the middle jutting out into the visual field, surrounded by concentric circles forever dissolving into a false but very real–seeming, limitless distance. It’s an optical conceptual feast, a conundrum, too, with structures defined by unfathomable emptiness.
[Image: Adam Belt "Down the Rabbit Hole (CMS Detector)" (2012) two-way mirror, mirror, wood, acrylic, LED lights 52.25 x 52.25 x 3.5 in.]
Media
Schedule
from April 10, 2012 to May 12, 2012