Shane McAdams is an artist and writer commuting between Brooklyn, NY and Cedarburg, WI.
He was always visually taken by the sculpted topography of the desert Southwest where he grew up. McAdams remembers being taken back when his father told him that the rock formations and bands of color in them had been fashioned by time and weather. He wanted to be the wind and make something the same way so his parents got him a rock tumbler for his 7th birthday. It’s payoffs were excruciatingly slow, so instead he chose to pulverize sandstone blocks with a hammer, dig into cliff faces to excavate minerals, and dredge the sand with magnets for iron dust.
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.
