Mac Adams — Gb agency — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 25 → July 28, 2011

For more than 30 years Mac Adams has explored the narrative potential of photography and installation, composing and constructing mysterious scenes on the border of social norms. Potential homocides, victims and could-be assassins populate his compositions, held together by a series of clues, carefully and methodically left by artist. Taking his inspiration from popular culture, crime movies, film noire and mystery novels, he creates static fictions within a tableau.

For the exhibition Mac Adams revisits a historical piece originally conceived in 1984, titled Looking through Blue (2011). This architectural fragment takes the form of divided room, whose v-shaped perimeter suggests the constructed perspective of a painted composition or theatrical set. A French mirror divides the space between a voyeur and his incessant lens and the object of his obsession. Mac Adams draws us in as curious onlookers of two lives — a dichotomy between a perverse gaze and an unknowing victim. The installation is presented with a selection of Mac Adams’ Mystery series photographs from the 1970s.

In the next space, Mac Adams presents a new series of photographs titled Forensic Fairy Tales (2011), works which reexamin fictional stories — traditional fairy tales such as Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks. Like a body of evidence, elements from each story are examined photographically, recording small particles embedded in and around the object. Here clues are indirect, their meaning unlocked by the title of the work.

The installation, titled Loose Threads (2010) consists of tables on which archival photographs and other photographs shot by the artist are formally arranged according to common motifs. The narrative is unlocked by a series of associations linked together by chance, calling attention to the arbitrary nature of meaning and the inextricable link to its context.

For Mac Adams the image is allegory, a continual visual metaphor that alludes to an ambigious reality where meaning is distorted, controlled and mediated through photography in a world of constructed representation.