THIS SATURDAY: BIO-BAROQUE








Adam's Website

ADAM WALLACAVAGE’S ASTOUNDING CHANDELIERS*

Adam Wallacavage has a thing for the sea. As a former Navy Sea Bee and an avid spearfisherman, he is intimately familiar with the profusion of grotesque beauty found in the vasty deep—and now, you can have it dangling over your dinner!

Adam’s hand-molded chandeliers are the offspring of his famed Victorian Philadelphia brownstone, an extraordinary series of surreal, taxidermy-laden grottoes he has spent years building. His house is one in which both Salvador Dali and Louis XIV would feel at home—not a small feat. His “biomorphic baroque” chandeliers—with their perverse combination of organic, wriggling tendrils and opalescent, confectionary colors—are simultaneously nostalgic and monstrous. Like the amazing rooms in his celebrated home, they suggest times, places, and creatures that never were. Quite the conversation piece, if you find constant exclamations to the tune of “Wow!” to be conversation, that is.

*Care and feeding instructions will be provided to the proud new owners. Jonathan LeVine Gallery is not responsible for the loss of children or small pets.

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BIO: MONSTER SIZE MONSTERS

Adam’s fifteen-year career as a photographer has now been put into book form by Gingko Press, entitled Monster Size Monsters. Adam, a founding member of the Space 1026 collective in Philadelphia, has long documented the skating and art collective underground, as well as shooting for Thrasher, Skateboard Magazine, Transworld and recently Shepard Fairey’s magazine, Swindle.

Adam’s approach as a photographer was born of the need to set up and break down his equipment very quickly—a necessity for his early assignments that required shooting skateboarders in dodgy or illegal locations. His signature trait as a photographer is his eclectic choice of bizarre subject matter, which celebrates the neglected, the marginal, and the ridiculous—people and places that are simultaneously everyday and otherworldly. There’s a charge that one gets in viewing his photos, because no matter how bizarre they are, they still insist upon their place in the world: lint peppers “alien” spacesuits, zippers show on monster outfits, and chariots have ATV off-road tires.

His photography is less concerned with exquisite lighting and compositions as it is with documenting the unadorned strangeness in the neglected corners of our world—albeit with exuberant energy and kaleidoscope colors. This “funhouse snapshot” quality lends a certain freshness, candor and hilarity that might be lost if a more fussy sensibility guided the lens. Adam’s approach to his work mirrors those he shoots, whether they are rock bands like GWAR or artists like Barry McGee. While the rest of us are zipping along on the barren interstate, Adam is showing us what lies at the end of those backwater roads.

At Jonathan LeVine Gallery
529 West 20th Street, 9E
6-9PM