MATS ADELMAN

MOMENTUM 2009 – 5th Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art

2009-10-02T06:21:00.000-07:00

Wood sculpture and walldrawing "Me despoille me gardez"

Some sculptures and paintings, 2000-2008

2009-05-17T08:14:00.000-07:00

HIAP Project room, Helsinki, 2009

2009-05-17T06:29:00.000-07:00

"Where the wasteland ends", installation with sketches and house modell shown in half dark room together with three films.

Exhibition

WHERE THE WASTELAND ENDS

Mats Adelman

13.05.2009 - 29.05.2009

HIAP Project Room

Current artist-in-residence at HIAP, Mats Adelman (b. 1974, Bromma, Stockholm), shows three short films shot on super-8 film. Suspended Animation documents the backwoods of a rural and industrial landscape, focusing on the setting both as a geographically set place as well as a state of mind. The film starts with a scene showing a man jumping off the edge of a quarry followed by short sequences from different scenes and landscapes; a flock of mechanical birds, slow takes over condemned shacks and a “zombie” walking through a meadow. The settings are reminiscent of horror films but are stripped of their gore. Another film titled A screw in a mechanism that twisted without twisting any other part of the machinery combines a fragment from a text by the German etnologist Hans Peter Duerr with sequences that can be described as documented experiments or phenomenon “accidently” caught on film. Sketches and paintings are shown as part of the development process of a new film Adelman is working on during his residency.

Galleri Elastic, Malmö, 2008

2009-02-03T03:38:00.000-08:00

Installations vy. Stol och skulptur i trä.

Filmstills från "Suspended Animation" och "En skruv i en mekanism som inte driver någon annan del av mekanismen".

Mats Adelman

11.18.08 ARTFORUM

AUTHOR: JOANNA FIDUCCIA

10.31.08-11.29.08 ELASTIC

Mats Adelman’s drawings are reminders that weirdos make art, too—in this case, the kind inspired by Black Sabbath lyrics and elaborately illustrated on the reverse side of class notes. Yet Adelman’s work is far more ambiguous than his backwoods aesthetic might suggest: as indebted to the imagination’s lofty reaches as to its lower fixations. In his current show, the young Swedish artist presents sculptures and a pair of films alongside landscapes befitting horror movies and antisocial adolescent fantasies—two settings that self-consciously find their high-culture likenesses in the avant-garde’s gothic drift and art’s long tradition of tortured genius. Quaintly rendered in graphite, ink, and watercolor, the vistas include condemned shacks and desolate cabin grounds (potential homes for the sculptures: a birdhouse made from shards of wood, and a birch chair crowned by three carved owls). But if Adelman’s works on paper suggest the arcane labors of a misanthrope, the artist’s films achieve a sinister charm with deeper aesthetic registers. Filmed on Super-8, they record the menace of rural and industrial borderlands with lush long takes fit for art-house cinema and with gruesome, climactic Hollywood scenes. The settings seem to belong to horror films dimly recollected and scrubbed of their gore. En skruv i en mekanism som inte vrider någon annan del av mekanism (A screw is a mechanism that doesn’t turn any other part of the mechanism), 2008, features a flock of mechanical birds and a Tarkovskian technique wherein the text (here, subtitles providing scientific translations of paranormal phenomena) is dislocated from the imagery. In one shot, a man walks backward along a path in the woods—a simple method of distortion that, like Adelman’s own ambivalent backwardness, makes all the difference between the merely spooky and the deeply unsettling.

Gallery Maribel Lopez, Berlin, 2008

2009-02-03T03:33:00.000-08:00

Tuschlavering, akvarell på papper, blyerts på papper.

Mind Mind Mind, 2007

2009-02-03T03:32:00.000-08:00

Akvarell på papper.

Cirkulationscentralen, Malmö, 2007

2009-02-03T03:30:00.000-08:00

Installationsvy. Träskulpturer, målning, akvareller.

Liljevalchs Vårsalong, 2007

2009-02-03T03:25:00.000-08:00

Installationsvy. Lavering på board: "Me despoille me garde", akvarell på papper: "Evil Dead", oljefärg på board: "Utan titel", träskulpturer: "Give me that old time religion".

Nordöst, 2005, stillbild från video

2009-02-03T03:21:00.000-08:00

Galleri Signal, 2005

2009-02-03T03:16:00.000-08:00

Installationsvy; träskulptur "Give me that old time religion" och vägglavering

Utan titel, 2004, stillbild från video

2009-02-03T02:43:00.000-08:00

Träskulptur, 2003

2009-02-03T02:40:00.000-08:00

Backwood, 2000, stillbilder från video

2009-02-03T02:28:00.000-08:00

4 filmer (Super8 överförd till DVD), film still