SLO Museum of Art is proud to a present the upcoming exhibit For the Time Being by artist Adam Parker Smith. This exhibit will be on display from March 23-July 7, 2024.
For the Time Being, a collection of eight objects by Adam Parker Smith, brings together works that reflect on our contemporary existence, and celebrate the present moment. With themes that include the fleeting nature of time, pushing boundaries, joy, and connection, this work invites a closer look to things that may not be what they seem.
Parker Smith’s engages the charged history of Pop Art – one that integrates imagery from popular culture, and commercial, mass-produced objects. Parker Smith takes these objects and materials – pool floats, sleeping bags, synthetic balloons, shag carpet, even spaghetti – and uses them to visually reference ancient objects that symbolize the passing of time. Amphora (Bradley Cooper) takes an object that originated in the Neolithic period to hold dry goods, water, food – but also as grave markers or urns – and infuses an element of pop culture. The fusion of classical form and contemporary celebrity prompts a reflection on the nature of fame and society. Sleeping bags as Sarcophagi (an early Roman stone coffin typically reserved for the wealthy) depict rest as a metaphor for time, inviting viewers to contemplate how sleep connects to the eternal rhythms of life. Forever Yours plays with weightlessness and constraint, symbolizing the nature of time as it simultaneously floats by and holds us in its grasp.
About the Artist: Adam Parker Smith’s practice is primarily sculptural, relating to painting, wall relief and appropriation. Following an extended conceptual project that consisted of Smith stealing his colleagues’ work, the artist turned toward a more traditional – perhaps earnest – approach to art-making. Working largely with ‘faux’ materials of all sorts, Smith creates highly composed, brightly colored sculptures and wall pieces that flirt with the surreal. Smith has exhibited work nationally and internationally, and has been written about in Art in America, Artforum, the New York Times and the New Yorker. For the Time Being is Smith’s first Museum exhibition on the West Coast.