Adam Parker Smith “Let’s Celebrate”

The Hole

This event has ended.

The Hole presents the third solo exhibition by Adam Parker Smith at the gallery. After “Oblivious the Greek” introduced his mylar balloon sculptures in 2016, Smith followed up with another Greek-inspired show “Kidnapping Incites Years of Murderous Doom” the following year. This exhibition leaves Greece behind to focus on a remix of more art historical than mythological references, contemporary ridiculousness instead of ancient nonsense.

“Let’s Celebrate”; like the sunny sculpture above we are tempted to rejoice, and like the sun balloon above we sink inevitably into the void and annihilation. With nine new sculptures involving these cast resin and car painted balloons Smith deflates their deadpan optimism and pushes tragedy past its edge and back over into comedy.

“Fearlessly the Idiot Faces the Crowd” features a pink dolphin stuck halfway through a hole in a cinderblock tower, grinning blankly from this precarious and embarrassing position. “Plank Piece III” plays with Charles Ray’s famous work from 1973 with, here, a cactus ballon curiously propped up against the wall by a plank of wood. “Thinking of You” remixes the work of Jose Davila crushing a saccharine “Thinking of You” get well soon balloon between two giant blocks of Carrara marble. A bust of Hercules, a Hellraiser strawberry, a Shibari-wrapped giant broccoli; these are some of the celebrations the artist has prepared for us.

Let’s Celebrate! Because nearly all the works in the show relate to confinement, suffocation, pressure or death they share a “gravedigger’s humour” so to speak. The artist wants to talk about life by challenging himself with death, the same way Jeff Koons wants to talk about meaning by creating the perfect emptiness. Each work is deceptively extremely well made and extremely heavy; instead of fake marble verneer these guys are the real deal; instead of resin covered mylar balloons here we have cast solid blocks of resin painted painstakingly with urethane car paint to look like 99cent store junk. Despite their dark dealings, these pieces nonetheless exist, and in the face of adversity; made only by great effort by many people pulling existence out of the void and an idea from the artist’s head into three-dimensional life. The artist muses that perhaps this is all the more reason to celebrate life and love and friendship—and artmaking.

Adam Parker Smith is a New York-based sculptor. He attended Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. His work has been shown widely in the USA as well as internationally in galleries and museums including: Marlborough Gallery, London; Galería Curo, Guadalejara Mexico; Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg; the Brooklyn Museum, Derek Eller and The Hole, New York; Ever Gold Gallery, San Francisco; Honor Fraser, Los Angeles; Parisian Laundry, Montreal; Galerie Sho Contemporary, Tokyo; the Times Museum, Guangzhou, China, Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe, Austria, and the Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE. Smith’s work has been written about in, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Art in America, The Village Voice, Artforum, Modern Painters, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker and The New York Post.