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CHRIS ADLER
Drawings No. 31, 57, 1, 67, 65, 47: A Line Dividing the City from the Country
3 November - 9 November 2020


Drawings No. 31, 57, 1, 67, 65, 47: A Line Dividing the City from the Country is a set of large format photographs that Chris refer to as drawings to shift the dialogue into a gestural, abstract, poetic realm. The works also have individual titles and are each 30’’ x 24’’ archival pigment prints.

These photographs are called drawings to suggest their gestural and participatory approach to landscape photography. They depict quiet alterations made to the land, often just to a bare patch of ground. For the artist, each work marks a temporary, meaningful site embedded with meditations on everyday life.

They claim fragments as narrative artifacts, treat material remnants as feeling sculptures, and prize absence over presence. Sometimes the titles become discursive poems. Having grown up on archaeological excavations, these works are heavily influenced by a childhood spent staring at the ground.








Titles

Drawing no. 31 (chevy) the center of a donut made by an old chevy left untouched between two winter rains

Drawing no. 57 (open circle) a photo taken on the first day of summer and developed on the last day of summer

Drawing no. 1 (mask) I plugged my camera into a rock

Drawing no. 30 (pole) a line dividing the city from the country

Drawing no. 67 (Tom’s rock’s) 30 rocks from Tom’s garden arranged in a grid on a sheet pan in the sun

Drawing no. 65 (Tom’s grid) 9 sticks collected by my son and stuck into a puddle we made because he loves the rain

Drawing no. 47 (9 lines) grid after the rain







Chris Adler (b. 1989, Boise, Idaho, United States) uses various methods of indirect transmission to tap into the georomantic power sources of the earth. Some of his methods include plugging cameras into rocks, digging objects out of the ground then putting them back, and finding quiet places to draw circles on the ground using twine and other found ligature. His interests include: the natural sciences, financial markets, free-form writing and his son.

Adler received a BA in Art & Art History from Colgate University, and an MFA in Filmmaking and Photography from CalArts. From 2014-2017 he founded and directed VACANCY, an artist-run gallery in Los Angeles. In 2019, The Fulcrum Press published “Scratch the Earth”, his first book of writing and photography.


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