Shane McAdams is an artist and writer commuting between Brooklyn, NY and Cedarburg, WI.
Always visually taken by the sculpted topography of the desert Southwest where he grew up, McAdams remembers being taken when his father told him that the rock formations and the bands of color in them had been fashioned by time and weather. Wanting to create something the same way, his parents gave him a rock tumbler for his 7th birthday. It’s payoffs were excruciatingly slow, so McAdams turned to other methods. By pulverizing sandstone blocks with a hammer, digging into cliff faces to excavate minerals, and dredging sand with magnets for iron dust, McAdams was able to transform nature in his own way.
“Forms in my work are often analogous to the methods of their creation. Their structures emerge from the physical properties inherent in the specific, mundane materials I use, such as Elmer’s glue, correction fluid, ballpoint pen ink and resin.”
The physical sense of land and material has continued to guide McAdams work, both as a symbol of process and as a source of content. He is interested in how the incremental effects of time can create something more structured and unique than he can make with his own hands. His work merges this accidental language with a the more traditional language of painting and, by contrast, questions what looks like nature, what symbolizes nature through process, and what is nature.
