05 Apr 2017

Dirk Adams: the sensation of moving slowly back in time

Distillery Gallery

Reviewed by Heather Kapplow

Dirk Adams's installation at the Distillery Gallery is several things simultaneously. It's a showcase of his idiosyncratic but relatable methods of parsing and connecting with the found materials he typically works with: an obsessive, yet improvised catalog of rust and dust and the evidence that objects bear of the their history.

It's a set for two performances, each an investigation laced with humor and the fine art of problem-solving on the fly.

It's a laboratory for experimenting with a set of rules. The performances feel like eerie glimpses into the deep past, a peephole on the cave-dweller's trial-and-error process of inventing, discarding, and refining tools.

Elements of the installation become musical instruments, used to develop a soundtrack for everything else that happens there.

Lastly there is an olfactory dimension, best left under-described, but definitely enhancing the work's main theme: humanness as the dogged application of perception to matter.