Dennis Adams. In the Red

About

These texts are over laid on found street posters, news photographs, book covers and film stills that push and pull against the visual and semantic readings of the texts. Adams adopts the American expression, In The Red, for the title of his exhibition, to mark the fragile link between the global financial recession of the last few years and more subjective accountings of loss. Originally overlaid on predominantly red colored backgrounds, Adams has more recently expanded his palette to a full range of hues, 

including the dark green used to paint over posters hung in the POST NO BILLS  zones of New York.

Walking on Wolves was first exhibited at Galeria Moises Perez de Albeniz in Pamplona in 2011. The work consists of one thousand eight hundred and thirteen sequential film frames printed individually and scattered in clusters across the entire floor of the gallery.  The sequence is extracted from José Luis Borau’s film Furtivos (Poachers), 1975, and spans one of the most savage and hauntingly beautiful scenes in the history of Spanish cinema. Against the backdrop of a lush autumn forest, the camera tracks a folkloric old hag tending her animal traps: the scene reaches its climax in her brutal attack on an injured she-wolf she finds caught in one of them.  Furtivos was released at the apex of the cultural permissiveness that had been building in the drawn-out months leading toward Franco’s death, in the fall of 1975. Directed by José Luis Borau, the story was conceived as an allegory that would test the limits of official censorship.  The film embodies the last throes of Franco’s brutal legacy through its depiction of incest and cruelty in its peasant characters.  Borau’s choice of the forest as the backdrop for his story challenged Franco’s myth of Spain as a “peaceful forest.”  

In its presentation at Kent, Walking on Wolves is only provisionally exhibited as a souvenir of its intended installation. In it’s full deployment, Adams’ scattered film frames were free to be walked upon by the gallery audience. This extended its allegorical reach into the present, as an index for our own fears. This display method would become the backdrop of  Malraux’s Shoes, 2012, a video in which Adams plays André Malraux acting out his anxiety as he paces over his plates from his Le Musée Imaginaire.