Shane McAdams: ball point pen landscapes

Shane McAdams is an artist and writer commuting between Brooklyn, NY and Cedarburg, WI. The physical sense of land and material, derived from the desert Southwesthas where he grew up, has guided his work, both as a symbol of process and as a source of content.

He is interested in how the incremental effects of time can create something more structured and unique than he might ever make with his own hands. McAdams recent work merges competing formal languages: those things that look like nature, those that symbolize nature, and those which are nature.

The form in this work is often analogous to the methods of its creation. The structures in them take root in the physical properties inherent within specific, mundane materials such as Elmer’s glue, correction fluid, ballpoint pen ink and plastic resin, whose limits are stretched by subjecting them to non-traditional applications.

These applications generate complexity that belies the simplicity of their creation, and in the process unearths fundamental questions about what is natural and what is artificial.

“This is a very protracted way of saying my work is about landscape, but in the broadest and deepest sense. It’s about the world we encounter at our feet that stretches endlessly before us, offering the possibility to either accept its expanse of raw uninterrupted reality, or to idealize, embellish, and edit it as we see fit.”

Images courtesy of Shane McAdams

Discover: www.shanemcadams.com