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TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY
A highly publicized artist Adam Parker Smith, who was the mind behind the newly installed Minerva statue at Texas State University, recently gave thesis guidance to university art students and gave a lecture to shine a bit of light on his process. The day of speaking and art critiques was coordinated by Artist Liaison Bekah Porter who is also a voting member of the TXST University System Public Art Committee that chose his work to decorate the campus. Smith’s process is unusual as he is the person with the ideas and with the painstaking duty of bringing those to life. His pieces involve teams of professionals that he procures to birth his dreams into reality, which in the case of Minerva involved recruiting his brother to learn an algorithm that could squish the classic statue Minerva into a cube and a team of Italian sculptors to make the computer rendering a reality.
The exhibit that launched his career involved a series of stolen artwork from various New York artists that he took while doing studio visits over the course of approximately five months. Right before the show, Smith emailed the victims to let them know what he had done.
“They had a couple options. They could either have their work immediately returned, or they could be in the show.
SEE SMITH The third option, which was not mentioned, of course, was pressing charges. But it ended up, long story short, everyone was in the show,” Smith said. “The show was very successful [and was on the] cover of New York Times, BBC art in America, and everybody wanted to do something with me after this show. … They all wanted to know what I was going to do next, and I had nothing. So this show haunted me, actually, for many years afterwards.”
After feeling “sidetracked” by the stolen curations show, Smith decided to go back to working with his hands. He created a piece using a shag carpet in which he drew with his fingers a Paleolithic wooly mammoth drawing, which mimicked the look of a cave painting.
“But for me, this was a way to prove to myself that I could just with my bare hands — without involving half of the art world and the police department and lawyers and critics — just be in the studio and make things,” Smith said. “Fabrication gets a little more complicated.”
This is when Smith transitioned from working solo to working with a team.
“A big part of my practice, more and more, has become working with other people who are good at making things,” Smith said. “I am, at best, a mediocre craftsperson. I know when something’s made well, and I also know how to find people who can make things well or convince people, at least, that they can make these things for me and do it for the amount of money that I oftentimes don’t have. But in doing that, I end up working with painters, welders, woodworkers, the whole gamut, really.”
One of his more technically challenging and macabre pieces, Standing on the Moon, was inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a series of sarcophagi that are made to look like sleeping bags and painted with the same level of detail. They are incredibly tall and stand erect with an eerie and imposing presence that mirrors the feeling of the muse from which they came.
“This came on the heels of the pandemic after massive loss of life,” Smith said. “The sleeping bag in the back is facing east towards the rising sun, which is oftentimes a way that many cultures bury their dead — facing the rising sun for rebirth. These are sarcophagi, but I also think about them as tuber pods, maybe some form of hibernation.”
What is the most incredible part about this exhibit is the burdensome process from which they were made. Since they are made using casts of sleeping bags, they had to find a way to make them firm and moldable without losing the fine details such as the wrinkles and folds.
“We’re putting a type of clear, ultra fast-drying super glue resin over the whole bag to give it a crispy shell. Unfortunately, it has a thermal reaction when it dries, and if you use too much, it catches on fire. So we lost a couple sleeping bags that way,” Smith said, adding that they used a conventional style of mold-making that uses rubber in order to mold an unconventional item. As the rubber added weight, the sleeping bags would grow taller. ”So we had to have sort of a dynamic mold where this bottom piece … we made it so that we could slowly lower it down. And as the bags got heavier and heavier, in fact, the molds got longer and longer. … But it was that part of the method was something that we sort of invented where the mold is actually shifting and growing as we’re as we’re creating it.”
View photos of Standing on the Moon at this link artsy.net/show/thewatermill- center-adamparker- smith-standingon- the-moon?sort=partner_ show_position
