Adam Henry “Overtones”
Candice Madey
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CANDICE MADEY presents the gallery’s second solo exhibition with NY-based artist Adam Henry, Overtones. Henry’s work investigates the realms that exist beyond our senses through painting, collage, and poetic gestures. Best known for lush paintings on canvas that probe the optics of the color spectrum and light, Henry has gleaned from his studies in phenomenology and color theory that our lived experience is haunted by the ways that our brains limit and deceive us. His paintings point to this: the optical effects that he employs often fool the eye, leading us to consider other limitations to our sensory experience of reality.
In this exhibition, Henry turns his attention toward the perception of sound. Both as a producer (his second studio is a recording space) and an avid listener, Henry has long been immersed in music. His interests, as one might expect from his paintings, skew towards experimental, minimal, and avant-garde composers like La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, and John Cage, the latter being a key influence for the works in this show. But he also has a more fraught relationship with sound. For years, he has learned to manage a persistent case of tinnitus, a disorder that is often a result of damage to the ear, brain, or auditory nerve, which manifests as a ghostly, high-pitched ringing in the mind of the afflicted. Famously, Cage was obsessed with silence as much as he was with sound. For Henry, silence is elusive.
The sometimes-blurry distinctions between sound and silence, inchoate sounds and sounds that have been made fully manifest, and sound that is seemingly “real” and sound that is only in our heads, structure works in Overtones, which Henry has conceived as a series of experimental scores. Life Score, for example, is a musical staff printed with the instructions: “Breathe in / breathe out / and / continue for / as long as possible”. This work is played by the viewer upon reading and continues until their death. It also provides an ambient soundtrack to the rest of the exhibition in the form of the rhythmic sound of the viewer’s breath.
Another keystone work in the show is Overtone, a small collage which is a cut-up picture of Ingrid Bergman taken by Robert Capa in rehearsals for a 1948 film. In it, Bergman looks dreamily skyward, her gaze fixed on an intervention that Henry has executed: a small circle has been cut out and rotated, so that a white section of the photo’s border now intrudes into the image itself. The “overtone” of the title refers to one of a series of harmonics that are produced in addition to the fundamental frequency of a given musical note. Some of these overtones are audible to the human ear, while others are not. In this visual metaphor, Bergman is enthralled by the appearance of a strange presence, which was previously beyond the borders of her perception. Here, then, is the show’s fundamental question: what if that which was hidden from us was suddenly revealed?
Adam Henry lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include CANDICE MADEY, New York (2021); River Valley Arts Collective, Hudson, NY (2019); JDJ The Ice House, Garrison, NY (2019); SALTS (with Emily Mae Smith), Basel, Switzerland (2017); University of Wisconsin-Stout Menomonie (with Anders Nilsen), Menomonie, WI (2017); 247365, New York (2016); Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, Belgium (2015), and select group exhibitions at CHART, New York (2022); JDJ, New York (2021); Alexander Berggruen, New York (2021); Arsenal, New York (2021); Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. New York (2019); Essex Flowers, New York (2019); Harper’s, East Hampton, NY (2018); Mother Galley, Beacon, NY (2018); Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2018); Rita Urso, Milan, Italy (2018); and Dia Horia, Mykonos, Greece (2018).
Henry’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artnet, Art Papers, Connaissance des Arts, Harper’s Bazaar, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz, The New York Times, L’Officiel Italia among other publications, and a monograph on his work was published by Meessen De Clercq in 2016. He is the co-founder of Elective Affinity Press, an artist-run independent producer of books and editions. He holds a BFA in Art and Art History from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from the Yale School of Art.
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Schedule
from March 24, 2023 to April 29, 2023