Meanwhile

About

Meanwhile alludes to the possibility of an alternative narrative, parallel to the main one, but with the potential to change the perspective of the general storyline. This concept underlines the narratorial and almost performative component of the works in the exhibition that involve impermanence, movement and interrelation with the public.

As a sort of postmodern hieroglyphics, Parker Smith's sculptures would seem to have a literal meaning. The fact is that the artist employs these industrial and handcrafted objects as brushstrokes: gesture, color and line in motion. Appearing light and floating but really solid, his works turn out to be a sculptural trompe l'oeil and an exaltation of the forms and materials used.

The exhibition takes place in an atmosphere semantized by the Homeric epic and the iconography of the spectacle and consumption society consumption, with all its tragicomedy and heroic fantasy. Within it we can see a series of characters in distress: some, we assume, trapped by a hubristic impulse that has brought them to their current state. Others, as a possible visual representation of the tension between materials, ideas, beliefs, desire and reality. Or, as a satire of the excessive mediatization or commodification of sex, love and personal relationships.

The artist updates these motifs present in Western art from mass-produced objects and ideas present in the collective imaginary. In this way he builds a personal vocabulary using common and pre-existing elements, in an effort to find a new meaning to what has been seen and reviewed so many times. His gaze subverts enough to generate a sensation of strangeness and familiarity (the uncanny) when seeing those anthropomorphized figures, a crotch reduced to the letter m, or the interpenetration between the two most famous Homers in history.

Meanwhile is the unraveling of our sense of complacency, the uneasy feeling that the things we thought solidified with facts and evidence are actually facades. Thus, a new branch extends in the diverse practice of Adam Parker Smith that alludes to this second meaning that any symbol can have, to the alternative plot that develops anonymously. And while we were paying attention to something else, something interesting and perverse has been developing behind our backs.