Adam Lark
April 19 – May 24, 2008
Reception and Artist Talk:
Saturday, May 3rd, 11:30 am – 2:30 pm
This event will be part of the 2008 CARFAC Artwalk.
Artist Bio
Adam Lark is a video and installation artist living and working in Regina, Saskatchewan. Adam graduated from the University of Regina with a B.F.A in Intermedia in 2007. He has participated in solo and group shows locally and internationally. His practice is one of observation and exploration, using the camera apparatus to investigate our surroundings and extract hidden meanings from situations and landscapes he encounters. Adam works primarily in video but does not hesitate to mix medias and experiment with traditional and non-traditional techniques and materials.
Artist Statement
City – “a complex interactive network linking together different social activities, processes, and relations. The city brings together economic and informational flows, power networks, forms of displacement, management, and political organization, interpersonal, familial, and extra-familial social relations, and an aesthetic/economic organization of space and place to create a semi permanent but ever changing built environment.” (Note is from Elizabeth Grosz’s Body City, in Sexuality and Space, ed Beatriz Colmina, Princeton Press, 1992) Body – “The body -the flesh, organs, nerves, muscles, skeletal structure is so to speak organically/biologically/naturally incomplete: it is indeterminate, amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities which require social triggering, ordering, and long-term “administration”, regulated in each culture and epoch by what Foucault has called the “micro-technologies of power” (discipline and punish) – the body becomes a human body through inscription and coding, through familial ordering and sexual desires…..so not only can it undertake the general social tasks required of it, but so that it becomes an integral part of or position within a social network, linked to other bodies and objects.” (Note is from Elizabeth Grosz’s Body City, in Sexuality and Space, ed Beatriz Colmina, Princeton Press, 1992) The mundane, the quotidian, the taken for granted, and the forgotten places have always held great interest for me as I struggle to find new ways to perceive and negotiate the city I live in. In this installation I am situating the city of Regina as a living breathing organism. This organism has a body with functioning systems and an internal and external structure not unlike a human body. I have determined that the downtown area is the head of the body and the project space in the Neutral Ground is a chamber in the brain of Regina.
The handmade aesthetic references Michel Gondry’s approach to materials and space as well as my own fascination as a child with building objects out of cardboard boxes. The thousands of white spheres mimic the thousands of tiny brain cells one would encounter in brain tissue, and the red glow from behind the opaque membrane suggests the presence of blood. The gnarled growth in the centre of the chamber reveals flashes of brain activity, moments of frenetic action, places of stillness, memories and dreams. The haunting audio of street sounds paired with the sounds of life, breathing and heartbeats, are intended to immerse the viewer in an experience of being present in a living organism’s brain. The intent of this work is to create awareness of the relationships between the systems of our own bodies (skin, bones, blood, veins) and the systems of the city (building materials, architecture, traffic and transportation). Consequently, this association between these two bodies draws attention to the impact that our actions have on The Body of Regina.
— Adam Lark, 2008
