ADAM GREEN: Houseface

August 17, 2012 | Author LDWT

American musician and artist Adam Green recently opened a new solo show at The Hole in New York City. Entitled Houseface, the exhibition consists of a series of paintings and sculptures and introduces a continuous loop screening of his feature-length film The Wrong Ferrari.

“In this exhibition, Green explores a reduction of cartoon imagery into modular sections and the evocative potential of their recombination. The works evoke the explorations of De Stijl and Mondrian crossed with the expressionism of his contemporaries like Joe Bradley, Ben Jones or André Butzer. Green’s architectural inspirations range from Gaudí to Hundertwasser and many paintings specifically reference high density housing, water towers and airports.

I liked something because it reminded me of something else – by Adam Green

I remember liking a Mondrian painting because it reminded me of a Monopoly board. There was a sentimentality in making this association which made me feel good. One of my favorite possessions as a child was a cat pendulum-clock. I remember placing special importance on its life-like characteristics. To this day when cleaning out my house I find that figurines – in fact any construction with faces or eyes – are hard to dispose of. We are myth-based and seek out ourselves in abstraction. We find faces in our coffee and we look for ourselves even in architecture and design. In this exhibit I’ve dismantled three cherished cartoon characters and simplified their components. I’ve reduced their essences to formal cubic cells. The transformation is extreme and we are left only with the subtle reminder of them, just enough to allow our sentimentality to poke through. It is in this final reduced form that these components can be used most effectively in architecture and design. Because we share a common history loving these cartoon characters, and because their design has proven effective, we can now incorporate them further into our own myth. Through the currents of these sentimental reminders and our natural predisposition towards animism, my new work seeks to capture a more life-affirming and ultimately less-disposable system of design. The works presented are paintings, drawings, and sculptures. The line-quality varies in the designs ranging from fairly straight to an expressive style where the straight line is the enemy. Initially inspired by Neoplasticism, video-game graphics and Persian tapestries, my instinct was to reduce these symbols into building blocks and to place them on a grid. Many of the designs are set upon a planar grid. Adhering to the horizontal and vertical laws of the grid – and with their evocation of eyes and mouths – they represent a fusion of the Neoplastic and animist ideologies”.