Mac Adams | Art Gallery

MAC ADAMS

Mac Adams was born in 1943 in South Wales. He lives and works in New York. 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 homicides, victims and could-be assassins populate his compositions, held together by a series of clues, carefully and methodically left by artist. The story and its fragmented reading is the essential element in the work of Mac Adams, a leading figure in the narrative photography movement of the 1970s. Whereas Conceptual Art and Minimalism accessed pieces of evidence, documents, and auxiliary information from outside the work, Mac Adams continues to reveal a story from entirely within the frame. Taking his inspiration from popular culture, crime movies, film noire, and mystery novels, he creates static fictions within a tableau. Using a process that is cinematographic as much as photographic, theatrical as sculptural, he invites viewers into the space-time of the work. These frozen moments, like the space between sequential moving images, are imbedded with multiple narratives, speaking from an indefinite place found between what we see and what we know exists.