January 14 – February 21, 2004
Project Space
Adam Putnam creates haunted, psychosexual spaces through his practice in performance, photography and video. His Magic Lantern series is based on the optical devices of the same name that were popularized in the Victorian Age and were, with photography, the precursors of cinema. Through anamorphic manipulations of perspectival space these illuminated set-ups explore the ways in which architectural spaces such as houses, rooms, and corners can contain an evil paranormal presence. The lanterns utilize motifs that appear throughout his work: the black ghost, the blue room, doubled bodies, the tesseract, the ziggurat. While engaging issues of presence and absence in minimal light sculpture, this work recalls the Gothic fiction of HP Lovecraft and the visionary writing of Nerval.
This is Adam Putnam’s first solo exhibition in New York. Selected by Liz Campbell, as part of the Emerging Curators Series.
