Adam Hayes “Given til Sundown”
Cindy Rucker Gallery
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“If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.”
— Cormac McCarthy
Men without a country. Men in search of themselves. Contemporary ideas about masculinity are often reliant on ideas about femininity, which means that it is constantly being challenged, redefined, or maligned. In Adam Hayes’s latest body of work, he layers images of early photography from the Old West with forms of professional wrestlers in struggle. Spaghetti western absurdist tropes highlighting toxic masculinity as the apex of manhood alongside a show of brute strength. But Hayes is not presenting these images as a critic but rather an examination of the guttural response, the fight, and the animal in man.
His visual cues draw from painters Agnes Pelton, Odilon Redon, and Jules de Balincourt and his titles are taken from quotes by Western folk heroes Wild Bill Hikock, Cormac McCarthy, and Billy the Kid. Hayes’s ethereal compositions dissect mythological iconographies, romanticizing the black and white idea of male and female while at the same time toppling symbols of white male power and selling the dissected parts for scrap.
Floating through each work are washes of yellow, blue, green, pink, and red, hints of the poetic celebrations of nature that explore the vital forces animating the physical world. The eyes that he incorporates into every work on paper gives an unforgiving stare, a nod to the necessity in early photographic portraiture to keep your eyes open for the long exposure times. Hayes’s abstract narratives are created by layering iconic imagery to create juxtapositions that invite his viewer into his exploration of “the time when light is too poor to tell a dog from a wolf,” or Inter Canem et Lupum, or the blurred line between the tame and the feral.
Media
Schedule
from September 13, 2023 to October 21, 2023