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Oct 27, 2024

Kim Adams crafts the comic absurdity of daily existence

Adams blends the monumental and the miniature in his sculpture “Arrived (Formerly Known as Pig Mountain),” on view at Art Toronto and then at Hunt Gallery. Canadian artist Kim Hunt with his sculpture

Adams blends the monumental and the miniature in his sculpture “Arrived (Formerly Known as Pig Mountain),” on view at Art Toronto and then at Hunt Gallery.

Canadian artist Kim Hunt with his sculpture “Stash” at the Hunt Gallery in Toronto.

For the last 10 years, the renowned Canadian artist Kim Adams has been working on a monumental sculpture called “Arrived (Formerly Known as Pig Mountain).” I saw a preview of it at Adams’ North York studio and was immediately struck by its size: the sculpture is an artificial mountain more than two metres high, two metres long and two-and-a-half metres wide.

Adams constructed it from cork and fake rock, with powdered pigments of green layered atop the rough landscape. Between the slopes, folded into each crevice, he has placed hundreds of miniature humans and animals. It is both a feat of technical virtuosity and a poignant reminder of the importance, and interconnectedness, of all earthly things.

At Art Toronto, Hunt Gallery will finally unveil the sculpture, a crowning point in his career-long exploration of modern life’s absurdities, expressed in his signature miniature worlds. A solo show at the gallery, featuring a selection of Adams’ sculptures, will then open on Nov. 1.

“I think of it like a novel,” Adams said, and indeed it has the ambition and finesse of some 19th-century epic. The setting of “Arrived” might be the fictional Pig Mountain, located somewhere between biblical fantasy and Canadiana. The cast of characters includes residents, labourers, vacationers, pigs, mountain goats and more pigs. Those pigs make up the plot, or at least one narrative through-line of “Arrived”: the invasion of hundreds of pigs threatens to upturn the peaceful coexistence between people and nature.

When viewed close up, Kim Adams’ “Arrived (Formerly Known as Pig Mountain)” reveals details like bright bursts of pink, red and yellow flowers, and two tiny teenagers on a makeshift bridge.

As I got closer, remarkable details of flora and fauna emerged from the greenery: bright bursts of pinks, reds and yellows from flowers contrasted with the earthy browns and deep greens of the forest floor. These exuberant colours recur everywhere.

With my face inches from the piece, I began to see human and animal life not apparent at first. I stumbled at random on a scene of two tiny teenagers standing on a makeshift bridge suspended above colourful plant life. Amid the ongoing narrative, here was a scene of delicacy and intimacy.

“Arrived” rewards repeated, engaged viewing. “It’s something you come back to because there’s no way you can consume it all at once,” Adams advised.

Even after all this time, Adams was still mischievously curious about the sculpture. As I continued making circles around it, he stood back in the corner smiling. “There’s probably town councils or country council people saying, ‘We’re going to have to do something about this pig problem.’”

By shrinking our world and amplifying the surreal, Adams reveals deeper social tensions. The clash between the chaotic forces of nature and the orderliness of human society feels futile — like trying to manage an invasion of pigs.

Adams, born in Edmonton in 1951, studied painting at the University of Victoria, where he was taught by Mowry Baden, an American-born artist whose kinaesthetic sculptures encouraged physical interaction with viewers.

Baden pushed Adams to think beyond the flatness of the canvas: to consider how distance, angle and light affected the way we see colour. Adams remembers Baden asking, “Isn’t it interesting what happens between you and the painting, or behind you as you work?” Adams began to think about how art interacts with its environment.

Baden also advised Adams to spend time in New York City. On a trip there in 1979, Adams attended a retrospective of German artist Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim. There he saw “The Pack (Das Rudel),” 1969, an installation of a Volkswagen bus with 24 sleighs emerging from it. The work had a profound impact on Adams.

“That’s where it changed for me,” Adams said. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this guy’s giving permission to use a car!’” Non-traditional and found materials would recur throughout Adams’ work, as would the combination of humour and critique Beuys used to interrogate the idea of progress and orderliness.

Adams’ first step into sculpture involved layering canvases with coats of paint, leaning them against a wall and positioning ramps in front of them. From this angle, viewers could see the buildup of colour, inviting them to consider the physical process behind the work. “I realized I wasn’t doing painting anymore,” he remembered.

A detail of Kim Adams’ sculpture “Andy Warhol Birthday Weekend.” By shrinking our world and amplifying the surreal, Adams reveals deeper social tensions.

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Adams developed an idiosyncratic style shaped by a range of artistic and intellectual influences: Duchamp’s ready-mades, the rise of conceptual art, Baden’s interest in optics, Pop art’s playful critiques in culture and his own historical interest in the 20th century.

His materials were scale models and toy kits, which shrink our world down to a miniature version of itself. For example, in “Earth Wagons” (1989-1991), he crafted miniature scenes of urban, suburban and ecological chaos, and placed them in trailers and red wagons. Carnivals abutted peaceful suburban homes, while monsters lay in wait near factories — an absurd but revealing portrait of modernity’s disjointedness.

This miniaturization allowed Adams to craft the comic absurdity of daily existence, to reveal the precarious balance of postwar life. It announced many of the methods and themes that continue to define his career.

Kim Adams’ “Bruegel-Bosch Bus,” which is on permanent display at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.

Adams is perhaps best known for “Bruegel-Bosch Bus,” a massive work he began in 1997. Like Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, who both used massive canvases to make work about the end of the world, Adams dealt with the apocalypse here.

His canvas, though, was a Volkswagen van. He covered it with thousands of miniature figures, miniature vehicles, action figures, vintage toys and found objects. Adams created a small metropolis next to the bus, which reaches up and over its roof. It is a damning work about the destructive path industrialization has ripped through the last two centuries.

“Bruegel-Bosch Bus” is an ongoing work. Twice a year, Adams visits the Art Gallery of Hamilton, where it is permanently installed, to tinker with it, adding a model here, taking away one there.

I asked Adams how he knew “Arrived” was done. “We had a conversation,” he said. “We both have to move on. The friendship is built. It doesn’t need anything more from me. It’s time to say goodbye.”

Now, the world of “Arrived” — in all its complexity, perceptiveness and humour — is for us to discover.

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