Press
Adam Stubbs is an abstract painter and user-experience designer who works in the tradition of abstraction to create physical and digital art. His work questions and celebrates themes of existence and enlightenment with aesthetics that initially appear minimal, despite the liveliness and drama that emerges on closer inspection. Large white, black, and grey fields are stages on which chromatic surfaces are built up with ordinary materials like studio detritus or fragments of low-resolution internet images. These materials are manipulated into forms floating in states between existence and non-existence, drawing comparisons with the abstract works of such artists as David Ostrowski and Elizabeth Neel. In addition, his work frequently explores the role of digital technology in painting as a strategy for creating new types of images, building upon bodies of work from artists such as Albert Oehlen, Douglas Coupland, Carl Fudge, and Jeff Elrod.
In the recent series titled "The Boreal Valley," processes of manipulating found imagery, creating forms and marks with intentionality, and drawing upon formal intuition and chance were heavily utilized in making the work. These processes are reminiscent of the approaches found in Julie Mehretu's and Gerhard Richter's recent abstract works. The images in this series began as low-resolution screenshots – found on the internet – of dark and violent environments found in a notoriously brutal dystopian video game. The artist was inspired to create something positive from the original images, so he digitally manipulated them in several computer programs until they were transformed into lighter ethereal abstractions. He explains, "I felt like my job was to help the original images re-imagine themselves. So I ran them through obliteration processes while looking for something new to emerge. Once it did, I helped give it a more defined appearance."
By creating new abstract images sourced from grotesque digital environments, intending to change a negative into a positive, the work opens a dialogue about the negative qualities of digital technologies and their potential effects. As a user-experience designer, the artist worked on many digital products and intimately understood how these experiences are crafted. "[Digital] experiences are designed in a way to make us want to engage, repeatedly, usually for corporate monetary gains. This is why I think it's significant to explore the impact immersive technologies have on our lives. Taking agency over our relationship with anything always starts with awareness, then intention." The artist elaborates further, "It's the nature of abstraction to present answers obscurely. My intention in this series was to show something hopeful and stop there. I felt like the pieces were complete when I captured a state of 'positive becoming.' In this sense, the images are not finished because even I don't know what they are turning into."
Since the work facilitates discussion about our relationships with experiences in the digital and physical worlds, the artist has chosen digital and physical mediums to bring the work to life. Each digital image in this series has been minted as an NFT, and is available as an archival pigment print. Given that the original sourced images were low-resolution images from the internet, the digital versions of each image will always have a size constraint; therefore, the minted NFTs and the archival pigment prints will never be larger than 12" x 18". But in addition to the NFTs and prints, a large canvas is painted of each digital image. The hand-painted canvases have a unique value in that they are painted at a very large scale (48 "x72"). Finally, as artistic interpretations of the digital files the physical paintings complete yet another final transformation for the series, bringing the original digital images fully into the physical world, leaving the digital world behind.
Bio
Life
Born in Atlanta Georgia. Lives and works in New York City.
Expertise
Physical and digital painting, drawing, collage and photography. Digital strategy, user experience design, design research, mentorship and leadership.
Education
The Rhode Island School of Design – 1999 - 2000 (Graduated, BFA)
The Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C. – 1997 - 1998
Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, Mercyhurst, PA – 1996
Exhibitions
“The Skulls Show”, The East Atlanta Lounge, 2012
“Senior Thesis Show”, The Rhode Island School of Design, 2000
“Final Projects”, Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts, 1996
Talks
“Branding and Promotion for Artists”, The Art Institute of Atlanta, Invited Speaker, 2007
Collections
Private collection, New York NY
Private collection, Atlanta GA
Send all messages to hello@adamstubbs.art.
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