As gallery curator Stephen Cleland observed on the Adam’s Instagram account, one of those events, Post-Calvinist Art (2019), was “eerily resonant”:
Arrange an exhibition.
Close the space and keep it locked
for the duration of the show.
Outside the exhibition hall,
post a sign with this text:
“There is a wonderful exhibition inside.
You are not allowed to see it.”
As it turned out, the Adam was able to postpone 92 Events, and the other three exhibitions with which it was shown, until the country returned to alert level 2, but the hiatus gave Stephen and gallery director Christina Barton the opportunity to reflect on different ways to present exhibitions and, moreover, accompanying talks and other events.
On the one hand, Christina and Stephen had a renewed commitment to making great exhibitions for people to visit.
“There is nothing quite like seeing works in the flesh that have been thoughtfully placed together,” says Christina—and her belief in this has been borne out by the number of people visiting the gallery since it reopened, not least students.
“There’s been this real hunger, I think, for seeing art in the flesh and getting that real material hit, even when these particular exhibitions were conceptually motivated and refined in terms of their material qualities,” says Stephen.
At the same time, the gallery has worked to capitalise on its growing ability to communicate online, “bringing content together with watchers, listeners, and readers to deepen and extend, reach out, and connect,” says Christina.
“There’s been this real hunger, I think, for seeing art in the flesh and getting that real material hit, even when these particular exhibitions were conceptually motivated and refined in terms of their material qualities.”
Stephen talks of “a new fluidity between conversations happening in person and the way those spill over online. In some ways, it’s been a really natural shift for us, and as a consequence we have been able to fast-track some of those latent possibilities for video and audio we wanted to incorporate into our website and programmes for some time.”
To accompany 92 Events, for example, the Gallery invited arts practitioners to respond to select event instructions and shared the results on its Instagram page. It also invited other people to post their images in response to Friedman’s Centre Piece (2003):
Imagine a life.
Live it.
The Adam has enjoyed the flexibility that online ‘Talking Heads’ conversations with and about artists offer, and the conversations’ ability to accommodate bigger audiences than the physical space of the gallery allows.
“We are building an audience all the time as people become familiar with what we’re doing and how we are approaching things,” says Stephen.
Another Adam innovation has been to invite artists to develop an artwork as a limited edition as part of its fundraising efforts, with proceeds supporting the Gallery and the artist.
The first edition was to mark the Gallery’s twentieth birthday last year and was an inkjet print by Billy Apple from his From the Decade Series.
The latest is Dane Mitchell’s List of Lists, a 12-inch lathe-cut record, with printed sleeve, signed by the artist. The record features the voice of ‘Amy’, the synthetic avatar who reads the index to the contents of Mitchell’s Post Hoc exhibition, created for the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019.
Both works are in editions of 20—an opportunity “for seeing art in the flesh and getting that real material hit” in your own home.
Particularly valuable if Ken Friedman’s Post-Calvinist Art proves prophetic again.
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