Bill Adams: One Man show

January 26-March 19, 2023

Opening reception: february 9 from 5-7 pm

Humorous, sly, contemplative, and earnest. Bill Adams’ work at first seems all about himself. Every figure, every character, in every photograph and painting in this exhibition is Bill Adams.

From basketball star to swashbuckler, or Women’s figure skater to Kennedyesque politician, the artist is the subject in each canvas and print. The elaborately staged scenes in these artworks are the product of years of work; most of the pieces took over five years to create. Each character is painstakingly costumed and photographed individually. Adams and his studio assistants then spend countless hours creating scaled and appropriately angled two-dimensional figures in complex and detailed scenes which come alive in a deceptively straightforward photograph. Some sets are nearly life-size, such as Deadeye’s twenty-five foot long movie-like setting. Others, such as Dollhouse and Camera Man, come from miniature dioramas that evoke an uncanny feeling of colossal larger-than-life sets.

Each of the characters in these artworks is the artist, but upon closer examination, the main character in most of these artworks is us. At a casual glance the photos and paintings can seem straightforward scenes; however, spend time examining the works more closely, and the artist gives us clues asking who is the viewer, who is being watched, and whose gaze is in control. Inspired by psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan, film-noir actors like Humphrey Bogart, the Renaissance perspective discoveries of Filippo Brunelleschi, or the philosophical theories of Jacques Derrida, it’s easy to become lost searching the mysteries of Adams’ art.

Bill Adams was born in Walnut Creek, California, in 1964, and grew up in Santa Cruz. He received a BA in Politics from Princeton University, and an MA and MFA in Photography from The University of New Mexico. He has taught photography at The University of Colorado Denver since 2003. Bill lives in Lakewood, Colorado, with his wife, photographer Carol Golemboski, and their two children, Elias and Claudia.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page to watch a short film that goes behind the scenes in Bill’s studio.

Artist Statement

I make large, humorous color photographs and photo-collages of elaborately staged scenes in which I play numerous different characters. I typically work on these complex sets for several years, and make successive versions of the same image.

Most of the characters are actually photographs mounted on cardboard. In some images, like Pairs Throw Axel, there is one real person surrounded by life-sized photographs. The figures in Dollhouse are about eight inches tall, those in Dead Eye about two feet. The final images are photographed with a 4x5” or 8x10” view camera, enlarged optically, and developed in a chromogenic processor.

While an initial inspection reveals that all of the characters are the same person, suggesting a digital composite, further examination indicates a straight photograph of a complex staged scene. There are often clues to the illusions, such as reflections of the back of cut-out figures lying around the set. The relationships of the different characters contrast with a single artist enacting a drama for his own pleasure or glorification—or for a self-conscious work of art.

Many of the scenes depict film sets, premieres, and other spectacles. The shifting identifications and points of view revolve around issues of voyeurism, perspective, and power. Some of these illusory characters are staging their own simulations, which mimic my own. In Dead Eye, the film’s killer’s point-of-view shot mirrors the point of view of the victim through whose “dead” eye we are looking.

Pieces such as Universal Picture and Point and Shoot lay claim to being completely transparent, extending the notion that the lens pictures what the eye sees. Since it can only depict what one eye sees, these perspectives represent a single eye looking through a spyglass or sniper sight.

Some images simultaneously observe a parallel attempt to create a visual model, whose shortcomings undermine the premise of optical realism. In Trompe L’Oeil, the Victorian painter’s own blurry nose is a reminder that what we think we see is very different from what is present in our visual field. The image further suggests that a visual model is a function of an ideological perspective. Conceptions of realism are socially constructed, and inevitably reflect prevailing power relations. The subservient maid, sumptuous decor, and Romantic painting style express upper-class Victorian values, even as the painter attempts to record optical experience.

Recent photographs contain apparently digitized areas, which are actually painted floors, walls, tables, and suspended objects. In Bachelor Party, the thousands of squares are painted, while the stripper's pixelated breast is a small board suspended between the camera and the figure. This simulated computer manipulation suggests that parts of the picture were not only photographed at different times, but perhaps were never present at all.

This digital fig leaf creates a kind of voyeuristic censorship, although what it purports to hide, it in fact supplies—and what it creates might itself be "enhanced." Yet this elaborate artifice is itself a kind of authentic fraudulence, for it is not digital but a physical object, and it is not an augmented woman but a real man.