Adamo Macri News

Adamo Macri: Time Is Love.5 San Diego

2012-01-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

The Garage Gallery & The Expressive Arts Institute Presents

Time Is Love.5
International Video Art Exhibition
3 February 2012
18H00 - 22H00

Expressive Arts Institute
2820 Roosevelt Road
San Diego CA 92106

Adamo Macri: Time Is Love.5 Berlin Germany

2012-01-05T09:58:00.000-08:00

Time is Love.5 [show 2]

International Video Art Exhibition

14 January 2012

7:00pm

SAVVY Contemporary

Richardstraße 43/44
12055 Berlin Germany

Curated by Kisito Assangni

SAVVY Contemporary

PDF

Adamo Macri: Time Is Love.5 Milan Italy

2011-12-27T09:43:00.000-08:00

Time Is Love.5 [show 1]
International Video Art Exhibition
10 - 30 January 2012

[.Box] Videoart Project Space
Via Federico Confalonieri 11
20124 Milan, Italy
www.dotbox.it

Curated by Kisito Assangni
Rhizome
Exibart
Art Lyst

Adamo Macri 'EXUVIAE' COP17 Durban South Africa

2011-11-24T19:30:00.000-08:00

LETTERS FROM THE SKY
International Artists & Filmmakers at COP17 Durban, South Africa
Experimental Film Festival on Climate Change
Adamo Macri: EXUVIAE

28 November - 14 December 2011 
ArtSPACE Gallery Durban
3 Millar Road, Stamford Hill, Durban, SA

28 November - 1 December 2011
Labia Cinema on Orange
68 Orange Street, Gardens, Cape Town, SA

4 & 11 December 2011
The Bioscope
286 Fox Street, Johannesburg, SA

40 international artists ‘Letters From the Sky’ an international Experimental Film Festival for COP17.

The globe’s attention will be focused on Durban, South Africa, where world leaders will converge to discuss Climate Change at COP17.

Letters From the Sky screens as part of the COPART Cultural Action. The festival, curated by Cape Town based Kai Lossgott will showcase a series of films from international artists and filmmakers. The festival has been supported by the British Council as well as the City of Cape Town’s Climate Smart Programme.

The South African Art Times
Media UPDATE

COMBUSTUS: Adamo Macri

2011-10-14T08:30:00.000-07:00

The Changing Face of Man

COMBUSTUS
The Changing Face of Man
Creatives and thinkers converge to explore the Aesthetics and Politics of Art

BEAUTIFUL! Adamo Macri Interview

2011-10-05T06:59:00.000-07:00

BEAUTIFUL!
Special Interview: Adamo Macri
October 2011 Issue

Adamo Macri: Time Is Love (Vienna)

2011-09-01T14:04:00.005-07:00

Time Is Love
International Video Art Exhibition
BILDETAGE
Barichgasse 6/1
1030 Vienna Austria

28 Oct - 6 Nov 2011
Opening: Friday 28 Oct @ 19H00

Including: Adamo Macri, Antti Savela, Eric Fong, Guy Wouete, Jennida Chase, Joas Nebe, Kika Nicolela, Kisito Assangni, Lane Last, Lemeh42, Martin Dege, Neil Howe, Osvaldo Cibils, Pauline Horovitz, Rachel Maclean

Curator: Kisito Assangni

Kenneth Radu: Adamo Macri Self-portrait

2011-07-26T07:09:00.000-07:00

"Displaying the same technical mastery of your techniques and tools evident throughout your Facebook faces, this latest profile picture strikes me as multi-layered, mysterious and resonant. It has become one of my favourites in the impressive series. Of course everyone sees what they see when studying your portraits, and like the others this picture elicits a multitude of responses.

Emerging from depths and shadows as if self-created out of a black matrix or nebulous primordial pool, the head and face are essentially covered, and the covering is both costume and meaning. The shoulders of delicate strength are bathed in light. The dark, oversize glasses obscuring the eyes suggest a celebrity seeking disguise, or possibly criminal character, an ironic modesty in the hidden, seemingly lowered gaze, or simultaneously aristocratic hauteur and indifference to the public, also sexual provocation and dark eroticism, intimations of animal ferocity, quiescent passion, or meditation and reverie which the public cannot enter.

The psychology of the artist is not the issue here. Almost insect-like, here is something or someone either pausing, or waiting for the next stage of development, poised to burst out of stillness, just freshly released from the chrysalis fixed to a silky black, shimmering background.

In addition I see a kind of alternate spirituality and authority born of the shadows. Lacking the veil portion, the headband puts me in mind not only of a swimmer’s tight cap suppressing luxuriance, but also of novitiates of Eastern Orthodox churches who wear the apostolnik or a black scarf to hide their hair.

This particular image depicts a subtle drama involving light and shadows reminiscent of Italian Renaissance painters to some degree, for the chiaroscuro reveals inherent oppositions of meaning, artistic intent insofar as we can understand them, and individual reactions to complex and powerful serenity. An interesting work to say the least."
- Kenneth Radu

Kenneth Radu is the author of a dozen books, including story collections, novels, poetry, and one memoir. His first collection of short fiction, The Cost of Living, was nominated for the Governor General’s Award. He has twice won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Best English-Language fiction award for A Private Performance and Distant Relations. His work has also been shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Journey Prize. In the spring of 2010, DC Books (Canada) published his latest book, Sex in Russia: New & Selected Stories.

Adamo Macri: Pageantry & Splendor

2011-06-17T12:24:00.000-07:00

"Self-portraiture wasn't ever a consideration of mine. The idea seemed strange at first due to its nature. Most people who know me closely are aware that I don't particularly enjoy having my picture taken. I approached self-portraiture in the same manner I would with any other artwork, by conceptualizing, adding depth the way narrative functions in subtle ways through sculptural work.

With this particular series Pageantry & Splendor, I was inspired with the idea of history and culture written with thread, based on the novel Splendor & Pageantry. The book served conceptually with the notion of arcane embroideries, the vestments, and the idea of an underground museum which houses the sacred artifacts."

Splendor & Pageantry (Ronald T. Marchese, Marlene R. Breu)
Textile Treasures from the Armenian Orthodox Churches of Istanbul
The New York Times
Çitlembik
Hürriyet Daily News

Facing the Faces: by Kenneth Radu

2011-04-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

Facing the Faces: the Facebook Self-portraits of Adamo Macri
by Kenneth Radu

Self-portraiture and painting are almost synonymous. Albrecht Durer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Titian, Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun, Francisco Goya, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cézanne, Edvard Munch, Emily Carr, Frida Kahlo, a legion of others: the walls of art galleries are heavy with images of artists who present their faces for the public gaze. The paintings allow us to see whatever aspects of the individual mind and character the artist chooses to depict. Their manner of presentation, technique if you will, may convey as much invisible mind as visible matter in the painted eyes, the chiaroscuro of visage, the angle of the head, the colouring and clothing, and the selection of objects. This great tradition of self-portraiture perhaps reaches a culmination of psychological and emotional drama in Van Gogh’s work or that of Frida Kahlo who was bedridden for many years, or in the agonized self-portraits of Egon Schiele. Great physical, psychological or cultural turmoil, however, is not the only motive for self-portraits. Certainly during the long history of Western representational art many artists worthy of their palettes painted themselves for reasons other than personal despair or social chaos. The art of the art itself is a powerfully motivating force.
In the last hundred years or so, self-portraiture has shifted or assumed alternative dimensions. It has challenged psychological realism, overtly narrative gestures and immediate recognition. Modern artists have reacted to displacement of the classic self-portrait by photography and film. They create portraits in new ways or create a public mask or persona to hide the private face. Given profound cultural changes wrought by computer technology, artistic innovations and experimentation, the self-portrait is no longer defined solely by the painterly assumptions and techniques of the Renaissance or the nineteenth century. I state no more than common knowledge here. Photography, which supposedly undermines the entire notion of representation in painting, is now just one of many contemporary tools or techniques available to the artist, specifically those who work with mixed media. If the self-portrait in oils no longer has the pre-eminence it once enjoyed, the urge to portray the self nonetheless remains a source of inspiration and dynamic art. Curiously, while thinking about self-portraits and the art of Adamo Macri, I am reminded of Alfred Stieglitz’s stunning photographs of the hands of Georgia O’Keeffe: photography here captures the intensity and mind of the painter whose face remains unseen.
Artists using their own body as their subject is therefore neither new nor startling. It’s perhaps a matter of degree and exposure, as the contemporary work of Zachari Logan exemplifies, or even full participation of the artist, say, in video productions involving the body. How much of the body, what parts or specific part; what the viewer is being asked to see, if indeed, the viewer is being asked anything at all; what the purpose is of the specific choice; the relationship between new techniques and new responses; whether or not self-portraiture is necessarily confessional: these are fundamental questions the artist poses. In the act of creating, the greatest artists perhaps remain detached from the viewer, their desire not to elicit response so much as to give face to their vision, game, political or historical outrage, moral apprehension symbolically arranged, aesthetic theories, mere whimsy, erotic fantasies, or to their conception of an alternately or radically designed universe, or possibly like Van Gogh to their personal demons. The response any painting or mixed media creation stimulates in the viewers is highly subjective. No artist can really be consciously concerned with the audience in the process of making the art, even when self-portraits seemingly stare right into the heart of the viewer, or ask the crowd to see what the artists are doing or “look like.” The portraits may arouse laughter, sympathy, libido, prurience, anger, distaste, even revulsion. Some installation art, however, depends upon audience interaction and is therefore created with that in mind, but here the focus is on photographic portraits.

Adamo Macri’s self-portraits demonstrate another dimension of artistic endeavour, very often one that incorporates traditional methods, but freely adapts and expands the very boundaries of art itself. Contemporary technologies like video, computer graphics, webcam and photography, fluorescent lighting, television, fibre-optics, associations with extraneous materials found on the street, in refuse, in nature, under sinks, under the microscope: wherever the artistic eye roves, therein reside possibility and utility.
Today the studio does not always smell of linseed oil and turpentine. Regarding a series of photographic self-portraits uploaded on his Facebook pages, Macri argues that as the subject of these images, he presents only one face which contains multitudes of meaning, depending upon the viewer. In conversation with me, the artist insists that he has “one 'face' - many depictions, ad infinitum allure, it’s an artistic approach based upon restraint, so much can smelter with little at play, subtlety is a wonderful delicacy as personalized style.”

That would be a perspective seen from the inside looking out. I maintain my position, as all viewers must, of looking from the outside in, and perhaps we see many faces. What do you see is a question most often asked about any painting. In a portrait especially, what does the painter show? If the artist has produced a series of self-portraits as Picasso, Egon Schiele, Munch, as other artists have in whatever style, is it one face or many aspects of one face? Is the work many faces, variations on a theme like Monet’s water lily paintings or his series devoted to Rouen Cathedral, or, since we are talking about portraits, the dozens of self-portraits by Van Gogh? They are all distinct canvases focusing on the same subject matter. Alteration and treatment, time and context, are everything. It makes sense to consider the many faces of Adamo Macri, notwithstanding the fact that he has only one actual face existing in real time and space available for his self-portraits.
Macri combines, co-ordinates, and positions the face in deliberately artificial manners which draw attention to artifice, to manipulation of responses, to suggestiveness, to ways out of the tendency to psychologize about portraits in oil. He employs the camera within a context of mixed-media possibilities, and liberates the self-portrait from the confines and characteristics of traditional oil painting. He imbues the images with fair measures of irony, self-mockery, bravado, the provocative and sensual; he selects disparate items and directs lighting inspired by cinematic art; he relies upon carefully chosen colours in background or costume; he adds accoutrements and focuses on facial expression or even lack thereof because in Macri’s art, what is not seen is as penetrating as what is. They intimate and imply. They are beautiful but untouchable objects to admire but not desire, to admire and desire, to desire but not admire. There is a kind of male beauty here of balance and form, images inducing yearning in some, amusement in others, applause, disapproval or indifference: the public face exposed on Facebook and the private self simultaneously hidden. Voilà: we have the face of Adamo Macri, or more to the point, the faces. True, traditional portraits on canvas can achieve the same results, but the crucial difference between them and Macri’s photographs lies not only in method, but also in space and time and, most significantly, venue.
The oil painting is fixed. Of course, any artist may scrape the canvas clean, paint over, a palimpsest so to speak, discard or destroy the work entirely. In its form and appearance as it hangs incarcerated in a museum or gallery, the portrait is done for all time. Once the artist loses control of the canvas and/or dies, it is even more done. In and of itself the portrait becomes the great and priceless “work of art,” an item on the auction block, the original rendered into a fetish, its uniqueness equated with cash and gallery obsessions, and the necessary thing tourists are supposed to see in the Louvre, the Prado, the Hermitage, the Tate, or the MOMA in New York. It is confined in tactile space and is absorbed by architecture to some degree, identified with a wall and the room one enters, sits or stands in, then exits. An intriguing note, however, related to Macri’s own method of presentation, is that self-portraits by major artists now “hang” in the boundless gallery of the world-wide web. What changes is the viewer. The very nature of viewing a self-portrait is fluid and tenuous, for perception and understanding cannot be fixed like arrows in a bull’s-eye, cannot like the painterly portrait be hung on the wall.

Macri’s faces on Facebook offer an oeuvre in flux: it’s always moving, always ongoing, each picture a ‘news’ item, au courant, as the artist uploads faces to extend, complement, or create new albums. Moreover, the act of posting images on Facebook, adding and subtracting at will, highlights the tenuousness of portraiture itself, how meaning in a face undergoes subtle changes, or the overall effect of a series of images alters by self-editing. In another sense the portraits create a new reality, the utilization of cyberspace as artistic and ironic gallery, ironic in the sense that it is nowhere, yet everywhere, a limitless space without form. The art depends upon the intangible. Discussing his work, Macri is quite emphatic about the relevance of Facebook to his conception of portraiture: “I began self- portraiture with the idea of how I would approach being active on Facebook, how that would represent me and my interests as an artist. I knew there wouldn't be any photos of me on vacation in Cancun holding a lizard. I approached it as an art form, the 'verb' to Facebook. I receive countless messages from people wanting to see a full body shot of me. My reply is always … this place is called Facebook, and I take that literally.”
Unlike the finished oil painting which, once it is hung, is housed, remains lodged in place until transported for a showing elsewhere, or taken down and stored, or immured behind glass like the Mona Lisa, Macri’s faces on Facebook are not secured and walled-in. They do not hang in any conventional sense. This allows for arbitrariness and quick costume changes, so to speak. He can pick and choose whimsically or purposefully, although there is a most evident pattern at work. The pattern, however, is neither engraved in stone nor seeped into a canvas. The face is freed from the restrictions of the frame and by extension from geography itself. Hence, what makes his self-portraitures intriguing is the phenomenon of Facebook itself which in fact becomes not only the “frame” surrounding Macri’s faces, but also a medium of artistic presentation.

Playfully alert to the multiplicity of Facebook, and all the faces posted therein, Macri faces the face of his viewers viewing him on Facebook, forcing us into a quasi-voyeuristic mode of apprehension. Instead of hanging his portraits on a wall, Macri transmits his images to cyberspace, engaging with the very nature of illusion, so the face can become immediately looked at without institutional interference. Again, the Mona Lisa in the Louvre provides a curious counterpart although it is not a self-portrait of da Vinci. It exists behind glass; one stands in a crowd to view it; there are no other comparable images of the same face surrounding it; the portrait is fixed to a locale unless taken down and moved to another physical and equally confining spot in real space.

Macri’s enterprise of posting faces on Facebook, saving face, a term that carries new resonance since it is possible to extract an image from the crowd and “save” it, could be seen as narcissistic, just as Facebook itself can be analyzed as a form of collective narcissism. We recall Christopher Lasch’s famous treatise, The Culture of Narcissism. Such pathologizing of a social activity in this context, however, is both a gross distortion of the art and of the artist, and a misleading simplification of Facebook. Macri is no more narcissistic than Rembrandt or Van Gogh or Emily Carr or John Baldessari, or all of us who post on Facebook for valid reasons that have little to do with clinical narcissism.

Macri knows what he is about and he embraces not only his own face as the art, but also the mind in the mind, and the emotions of the viewer as they examine his face, looking for clues, projecting aspects of themselves onto what they see. Most often the Macri face is serene, non-committal, impassive, a physiognomic restraint containing subtleties of speech, emotion and intellect, a seeming blankness like a mannequin. In other portraits there are different positions of the eyes or lips or head. Indeed, various and plentiful responses posted under individual photos or portraits indicate the subjectivity of perception and also convey the complex intimations of the face itself. As in literature, a first person narrator is not necessarily the author, so the self-portrait of the artist posted on Facebook is not necessarily the person.

His acts of portraiture, acts because each series or sequence of photos is a visual drama or narrative, raise the question of why his photos collectively are regarded as art, whereas all the personal photos of our own faces and our friends, real or illusory given the nature of Facebook, are not. Insofar as we post pictures and personal comments, video clips and articles, cartoons and jokes, and celebrate our own activities and achievements, it’s easy to understand why Facebook can be construed as a community of narcissists, except we ask others to look at our vacation and other pictures as we look at theirs, exchanging bits of information and memory. We share photos for reasons beyond mere celebration of the self. We have no artistic vision or purpose in mind even if some conscious artistry was involved in the taking of a photo. We look at the image of others, an act that breaks self-involvement to a degree. We have no other impulse than to share information about ourselves and others in the Age of Information.

There is validity to the concept of electronic community and networking that reflects more than individual ego. True, we would not call upon most of our Facebook friends to help us move furniture or look after the dog, depending upon our individual and personal reasons for facebooking and the range of our “friends.” Something significant is operating here. As Macri himself has said: “the essence, importance, relevance: the practice as a sign and significance to contemporary life. Never before, in history was the act of photographing oneself so prevalent. Modern culture, computers, portables, social networking, the diary, personal journals magnified, this hyper-activity and need of having to photograph oneself, just about everywhere we go and whatever we do, getting it published immediately within seconds. Makes people feel more 'alive' within what’s been stigmatized cyberspace, the 'unreal' world or existence. Ironic?”

To answer a rhetorical question: yes, I think so. Macri’s portraits constitute mirrors in a less obvious way than, say, the discombobulating installation art of Ken Lum whose mirror works, specifically Mirror and Twelve Signs of Depression, force viewers to see themselves at odd angles in the juxtaposition of mirrors, to lose a sense of direction, to laugh at one’s self, then to feel discomfort from prolonged exposure to physical reflections and consequent disorientation. The question is: do we see ourselves reflected in the mirror of Macri’s face any more than we see ourselves in self-portraits by Salvador Dali or Raphael? Self-portraits by definition supposedly are revelations of artists as they see themselves or, more importantly, as they wish to be seen. Wish is connected with fantasy, a challenge perhaps to realism and reason, as artists construct their image, their body, their face which becomes the art itself. In his autobiography, Secret Life, Dali writes about one of his self-portraits: I wanted to give myself a ‘weird appearance’ as soon as possible, to compose a masterpiece with my own head.”
“Weird appearance,” “a masterpiece with my own head:” these are terms applicable to much in Macri’s photos. They bring to mind the underlying tensions of play and carnival, the subterfuge of satire, the powers of pretense, the discomfort caused by exposing in nuanced ways what has been suppressed or repressed, the spirit of carnival, mardi gras, if you will. They silently mock and sabotage conventional pieties of appearance and decorum, not to mention blowing up standard portrait idealizations by commercial photographers. This is achieved not by grotesque or violent alteration of appearance but through restraint and suggestiveness. In the history of oil painting one of the “weirdest” and most carnivalesque portraits is Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Summer, a facial profile constructed with fruits and vegetables which is essentially allegorical in purpose. It’s not a self-portrait of anyone in particular, but a visualized concept.
In the series entitled Fortified October many of Macri’s head shots are presented in costume, so to speak, the head covered and arranged in both usual and unusual items from a standard baseball cap, to the use of a velvety-looking animal mask, to silvery chains hanging over the forehead between the eyes and draping the face. There is, however, no distortion or Mannerist allegory in the style of Arcimboldo, for Macri remains recognizably himself, allowing symbolic intent to be inferred as much as implied, and not “painted” thickly on. In all the photographs, Macri’s eyes do not look directly at the viewer which is reminiscent of Van Gogh not directly gazing at us in his self-portraits, as if the artist is unaware of an audience, itself ironic. Such poses presuppose admiration from afar: viewers wondering at what they see, the artist displaying his face in costume, in make-up, tilting the head, averting the direct gaze as if he is caught in private pre-occupation and not on public display. Yet, uploading photographs of the self on Facebook is asking for attention: the personal face as objective art, as artifice, as artifact. One is asked to look, to see what the portrait possibly means about what cannot be seen: inner life, inner drives, private dreams of artist and viewer which we are invited to interpret as we please.

The title Fortified October is at first odd. A month in the autumn strengthened, fortified like vitamins, applied to photographic portraits which do not depict falling leaves, harvested crops, chilly nights, or the walls of a fort. The pictures could well have been taken in October and the artist may mean no more than that. Macri realizes that words attached to a painting or picture, or a photographic triptych, acquire significance beyond his initial naming. For viewers, as they see, so they name, and the face on Facebook or the orchestration of photographic selves is also the presentation of a face to meet other faces. Yes, it is all one face, a public face containing a private reality from which we are excluded but are invited to visit through speculation, possibly intuition, to imagine, to engage, maybe even shape to our own fantasies and needs.

Inevitably, someone, myself for example, will think of T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: “There will be time, there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” Just what “self” does the artist depict for the viewer? Do we contain multiple selves, as many as the faces we present to the public? The questions are rhetorical, albeit serious, for the answers go beyond the scope of this paper as well as my ability to supply them. So what do we see in Fortified October? What does the artist mean when he dangles metallic jewellery in the form of fine chains over his face? What does the animal-looking mask portend? Then we see a severe pose in which the hair has been pulled back and confined under tight cloth, black eyebrow mascara liberally applied, the taut, angular features of the face itself brought into sharp relief. The face is at times darkened with beard stubble, other times shadowed and lit by a play of lights. In some pictures the artist resorts to large sunglasses, in others the eyes are obscured as he rakishly tilts his head and hides them under the brim of a stylish black hat. In one he seems to be sporting a bluish vest, but in the upper left corner of the picture there is a skull of bluish tinge. The meaning can be whatever the viewer sees, depending upon emotional and intellectual involvement. Although Macri is offering an interpretation of his own photos through the accoutrements applied to the head, he arrays himself beyond the standard formal photograph most of us possess, and by so doing opens up the doors of inquiry, fancy and supposition.
Macri’s face albums are individually entitled. If one studies the images and thinks of them in terms of the title words, elements of mystery and play enter the picture. For example, in one of the most recent additions to Facebook, the artist has chosen to focus on three representations of lips, full and pink, gently embracing a strawberry, either real or false fruit. Of course the triptych is both sensual and sensuous, that goes without saying, but I also find it witty, as if Macri is relying on a visual cliché or the erotic application of certain foods, and poking fun to some degree at our collective inclinations. The title of this particular triptych is Beetle of Hectares. What a beetle has to do with lips and a strawberry, and what the images have to do with the measurement of terrain, may lie more in the realm of humour and gentle mockery than it does in meaning.

We could think of scarab beetles with their bejewelled backs or Beetlejuice, the movie with its comically satanic association. We could think of insects and check other Macri images of the artist sporting oversized sunglasses which appear like eyes magnified. We could think of folk songs and strawberry fields forever or of lovers eating erotically and all the sexual connotations of mouth and tongue. We could think of the act of swallowing, as if by aiming the lens at the specific details of lips and fruit, the image says more about the viewer’s preconceptions and fantasies than it does about the artist who clearly knows the kind of response he will undoubtedly receive, some more blatantly sexual than others. The swallower swallowed by the audience. And there is a mischievous invitation here: the viewer invited to share an intimate moment with the artist, to delight in tactility and the textures of skin and the hue of fleshy pinks, the promise of potential, for the strawberry itself contains innumerable seeds. Either real or fake, the fruit is about to be bitten, swallowed, ingested.

The berry contains within itself the means to regenerate, each seed producing a little version of itself, homunculi as one of Macri’s admirers suggests. Macri himself reminds us that “the strawberry plant sows widely and propagates rapidly by runners on the ground. Each individual berry holds an average of 200 seeds. This fleshy fruit is considered a pseudocarp, meaning false fruit. Unlike other berries and fruits, the seeds are on the outer surface, their pericarp (womb) surrounds each seed making each pip the actual fruit and not the berry itself. In the triptych both the strawberry and the lips are equally presented." The seeds therefore are potential; fruition is possible. Seeds from one womb, in a manner of speaking, to be grown in the fertile matrix of another, in this case, the imagination of the artist. For all that significance, the triptych remains both sensual and funny.
Another triptych is named Quonset Hut. Adamo Macri presents his face, not directly staring outward, although in the first of the series he seems to be peering at a slant at his viewers, his head covered with a black cowl. He wears his signature dark-rimmed glasses in two pictures, eyes open, removes them in the third, eyes closed. In each he holds his head at a slightly different angle, in the last especially his head and eyes are cast down as if in a private moment of prayer or reverie. Aside from the rounded effect of the cowl which may suggest the shape of the Quonset hut and perhaps the red and seemingly metallic blue colouring of the background, what is there to justify calling this particularly intriguing set Quonset Hut? Nothing, really, for again, Macri is playing with the relationship between images and words. The words almost compel viewers to perceive the shape of the head in terms of the Quonset and yet the portrait has little to do with those hollow and empty shells, often used in the military, now as workshops and garages.

There is something decidedly monkish about the appearance. The eyes are as important as the quasi-Grecian cowl which reminds me of what a blind prophet might wear to the Acropolis on a windy day in ancient Athens. I don’t make the analogy lightly because I believe Quonset Hut has to do with perception and secrecy, with eyes that turn inward to see what we cannot see. The artist allows us to behold the face, but there is privacy still, a withdrawal, a withholding of the most secret self or desires. The viewer may speculate but cannot enter. What an ironic inversion of Facebook itself with its claim to social networking and publicity in the midst of which Macri the artist creates a most private self eliciting public admiration and the perennial gaze.
As a multi-media artist, Macri does point to an intimate, often beguiling relationship between language and image as several artists do. Consider the Prima Facie (At First Sight) work of John Baldessari. The photo of a person is placed next to many words, thereby compelling the viewer to see or judge the picture in terms of the text. The words change perception and understanding. If a picture is worth a thousand words, as the famous line goes, one word can change the picture. Macri argues that “the title itself becomes an actual element of the visual work, it’s perceived as multimedia in that manner, mediums or media, the text as medium.”

We know that the words of a painting’s title often determine how we initially react to or see a painting. The title may be a statement of obvious content, but after the painting is understood it may point to a larger significance. Obvious examples are J.E.H. MacDonald’s A Tangled Garden, and Emily Carr’s Among the Firs, both titles of which tell us what we are looking at, but they do not necessarily reveal implications, mythological resonance, emotional realities. Even without seeing the picture, anyone unfamiliar with MacDonald’s painting would be accurate in suspecting it has something to do with an overgrown, perhaps wild garden. I don’t wish to diminish the significance of this work as it remains one of my favourites given its subject and execution, but here word and image are virtually identical. One reinforces the other. Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, however, is striking because the canvas displays anything but our preconceptions of fire, not to mention the significance of voice. Jean-Paul Riopelle’s Quinze Chevaux Citroën, to name just one of his canvases, is another jarring and arguably tenuous association between title and painting. One can continue this exploration ad infinitum which may well be the point. Macri is alert to the significance of titles and likes to kick start speculation, as he does with Quonset Hut or Beetle of Hectares.

The Profile photographs themselves, a visual précis, provide a protracted display of character and intent, but so much more than what the Facebook word “profile” usually entails. Macri may well be bouncing his images off the meaning of profile and, yes, here he is in a series of profiles, each image offering an interpretation by its pose, and encouraging viewer participation or projection. Bearing in mind that profiles on Facebook are subject to arbitrary change, the image removed without notice, it’s not wise to create an argument about the artistic coherence of this album since pictures that appear here can and do appear elsewhere. The juxtaposition, though, of old portraits with new and the gathering of images from several albums into the Profile section effectively create a new, yet ever-ineluctable statement of intent or artistry which necessarily remains unstable.

The pictures as postcards, as it were, are sent to everyone and everywhere and can be retracted at will, for Macri indeed uses Facebook as a vibrant medium. If the artist insists that he has one face, depicting subtle variations upon a theme, and is not to be viewed in the same light as Lon Chaney, the legendary Man with a Thousand Faces, he is right. As stated in comments about Fortified October, Macri applies theatrical cosmetics to a degree, arranges and adorns his face as if creating a persona without fundamentally violating the structure of his appearance. He adds props or accoutrements like glasses, sunglasses, chains, a mask, a half-mask, but he does not disfigure or transmogrify his face to correspond with whatever character he happens to be playing. In that sense his face is one face.
He encourages viewers to think about the face, however, and slyly alters his look, draws attention to the interaction of light and reflections in the lens of his glasses, his eyes are visible, then hidden. His looking or his regard is oblique, peering off to a corner, glancing away as if seeing something we do not immediately apprehend. Animalistic masks like the ones in Fortified October acquire a symbolic function, pointing to irrational elements of personality, a kinship between human and beast. Gender blending or manipulation, masculine, feminine, androgynous: the terms are without significance, really, as Macri engages in new transmutations of his face, shifting into other faces while remaining himself.

He presents a visage severe and angular, features highlighted by cosmetics like a character in a stage play or a face showing all the concentrated restraint and control of a dancer in a modern dance company. In contrast he appears as potentially rough like an unshaven, insouciant worker on a construction site. He becomes an elusive idol behind sunglasses, or an alleged criminal in mug shots, the celebrity hiding his eyes behind white bands to protect his identity which the public already knows, the public face that is: the actor attempting disguise in the midst of public exposure and acclaim. In one of our conversations, Macri reveals his deep concern with “conceptualizing, creating by the use of the webcam and face, the restrictions imposed, the subtleties and nuances, how every detail constructs narrative, metaphors and symbolism.”

To illustrate, interspersed among the faces is another, other-worldly face as if it has emerged fully-developed from a womb, a prop similar to a rooster’s comb, a kind of organic growth extruding from his brain, his body seemingly breaking out of a womb-like substance, an image that appears elsewhere in Macri’s art. Remarkably, it’s one of the few images wherein the eyes confront the viewer directly, and it’s also important to point out the face is not Macri’s, but a model’s, a staged presence and/or appearance amidst the pictures of the artist himself. It’s a face connected with a mysterious narrative, the carefully selected details supporting a symbolic story. The headdress and womb-like background indicate Macri’s fascination with organic growth and its interfacing with the human and non-organic world. The bizarre or outré settles in, despite the initially jarring effect, naturally with the mundane. In one or two photos, for example, the artist wears a baseball cap which echoes both childhood play and contemporary male sports and camaraderie.

Like any Facebook profile, Macri’s Facebook faces can be dismantled, re-arranged, deleted or extended. Each singular photograph is part of a larger, never-to-be completed series of provocative albums, thereby changing the collection, reminding viewers of the intangibility of the portraits, of the essential unknowability of the man behind the face. The artist now possesses the freedom to manipulate his face whimsically, suddenly, just as the rest of us add and subtract and rearrange our own photos. The entire project could disappear overnight as if purloined by art thieves, or self-effaced.

That being said, clearly Macri’s artistic vision is fed by the profound revolution in technology and communication. Again, speaking with the author, Macri has expressed his view that “the general public and the younger generation aren’t all consciously aware of change and its impact. We are forced to adapt so quickly, it’s difficult to get a bird’s eye-view analysis of our behaviour and the manner in which we operate versus how things used to be, how this relates to art practice, publishing a 'visual journal' mapping out our lives, through the act of portraiture and how easy it has become my work.” In this instance, given the nature of Facebook, the artist is creator, manipulator, curator and thief, if he so chooses, of his multiple images, of his mapping in the illusory geography of cyberspace. And that is at least as challenging and complex as self-portraits framed and hanging on a wall.

Adamo Macri: Time Is Love 4 [Guangzhou China]

2011-04-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

Time Is Love 4
International Video Art Exhibition
Espace ApART
Xiao Zhou Cun, xi yuan yi xiang 9
小洲村西园一巷９号
Guangzhou China

April 30, 2011
6:00 - 8:00pm: Screening

Including: Osvaldo Cibils, Julien David, Kokou Ekouagou, Samira Eskandarfar, Eric Fong, Christy Gast, Rachel Maclean, Adamo Macri, Joas Nebe, Alex Pearl, Antonio Pinto, Ludovic Sauvage, Antti Savela, Philippe Van Wolputte, Kisito Assangni

Curator: Kisito Assangni
Special Thanks to event coordinator: Frank Gerlitzki

Adamo Macri: Time Is Love 4 [Sint-Lukas Gallery]

2011-03-12T13:56:00.000-08:00

Time Is Love 4

International Video Art Exhibition

Sint-Lukas Gallery

Sint-Lukas University College of Art & Design

Paleizenstraat 71

1030 Brussels Belgium

17 March 2011

On the occasion of the Here is there, there. BXL-LDN exhibition at Sint-Lukas Gallery, curated by Laurence Dujardyn and Tom Trevatt, Time is Love 4 is invited for a special screening on March 17, 2011

6:00pm: Screening

7:00pm: Talk with Kisito Assangni curator of Time Is Love, introduced by Laurence Dujardyn

Artists:

Adamo Macri, Alex Pearl, Antonio Pinto, Christy Gast, Eric Fong, Fabienne Audeoud, Kai Lossgott, Lane Last, Ludovic Sauvage, Martin Dege, Michele Magema, Neil Howe, Philippe Van Wolputte, Rachel Maclean, Samira Eskandarfar

Adamo Macri "Fragments" Arnot Art Museum

2011-02-28T11:44:00.000-08:00

FRAGMENTS

Video Collaboration Project

Arnot Art Museum

235 Lake Street

Elmira, New York USA

April 6 and 7, 2011

Participating Artists:

Adamo Macri (Canada), Slide

Aditi Kulkarni (India), Hypnosis

Alberto Guerreiro (Portugal), Haiku#1

Alicia Felberbaum (United Kingdom), Landing

Alison Williams (South Africa), Threshold

Antonio Pinto (France), Time between Collapses

Assangni Kisito (Togo), Wall Dancing 2

Brad Wise (USA), Time Lapse Movies of City Scapes

Christine Heusner (USA), Chiasm

Claus Collstrup (Denmark), Transistor 6, Virgin Venom, (Sonic work)

Cora de Lang, (Argentina) Qui Dice

Dave Swensen (USA), Devan and Jeremiah

Doug Anderson (USA), Herakles Fragment Selection

Germán Britch (Argentina), TV is a Weird Thing

Irina Gabiani (Luxembourg), Das Glasperlenspiel

Joas-Sebastian Nebe (Germany), Strassenmaschine

Kai Lossgott (South Africa), Read these Roads

Larry Caveney (USA), Dance Series

Ludovic Sauvage (France), Eden's Bloom

Melanie Chilianis (Australia), Vox 1, Vox 2, Vox 3 & Part 11 Layered

Niclas Hallberg (Sweden), Container III Exploit 1,5

Osvaldo Cibils (Italy), Fiorella 100 Years

Per E Riksson (Sweden), Fragments

Stina Pehrsdotter (Sweden), Sanguinis Fluxio

Ulf Kristiansen (Norway), The Insect of Hope

Uma Ray (India), Jolashoy

Vigga Vangsgaard (Denmark), Sleep

Willy Darko (Italy), Anni 70

48073 (Holland), 10221 Progress 2

Organizers: Marty McCutcheon, Michael Chang, Jan Kather

Fragments is made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts' Decentralization Program, administered locally by the The ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes

Adamo Macri: Time Is Love - Baltimore USA

2011-01-23T12:31:00.000-08:00

Time Is Love 4
International Video Art Exhibition
Hexagon Space
1825 North Charles Street
Baltimore Maryland 21201 USA
February 26, 2011

Screening: 7:00pm
Talk: 8:00pm Kisito Assangni with Shaina Craft, Coordinator of Hexagon, followed by a public discussion.

Time Is Love Screening
RHIZOME
Art Review

Adamo Macri: Time Is Love 4 - Switzerland

2010-12-05T08:25:00.000-08:00

Centro Arte Contemporanea Ticino
Via Tamaro 3 CH 6500
Bellinzona Switzerland
January 22, 2011

Screening: 5:00pm
Lecture: 6:00pm Kisito Assangni with Mario Casanova,

Director of CACT, followed by a public discussion.

CACT
RHIZOME
SPACE Cool Hunting
Exibart
SANART
eramoderna
Luigi Boschi
CACTyou!
African Colours
Art Review
Time Is Love Screening

Cellular Excitement: by Kenneth Radu

2010-10-13T11:37:00.000-07:00

Cellular Excitement: An Appreciation of the Art of Adamo Macri
by Kenneth Radu

In many of his drawings, photos, constructions and other pieces of art, Adamo Macri depicts various forms existing beneath the visible surfaces of the world, and the reality of secret miniscule life teeming in obscure places. He explores, or imagines, acts of creation from the fundamental cellular level of existence to the intangible world of states of mind and desire. His style emerges from multiple techniques for he is a multimedia artist working with a wide range of technologies and organic elements. His drawings and Still Lifes often appear curled and whorled as if produced in a swirl of electrified haste, but they are nonetheless deeply imbued with intimations. One cannot help but feel that in Macri’s art the birth of the cell is the beginning of raw passion, the latter term to be understood as energy, feeling, changes, and violations of conventional attitudes or standard responses.

Many of his drawings are concerned with the elemental phenomena of existence, intimate states of desire and transgressive yearnings at times which, paradoxically done in tones of grey, illuminate pre-rational being. Lines connecting, inserting, rotating; the circular and circulating; the unfolding and opening; the receiving and the penetrating; fierce currents of bodily fluids; the energy of seeds bursting, of life fomenting; the provocative daring of instinct and urges, erotic connectedness outside the realm of romantic banality and oppressive morality, but within the dynamic of instinct unleashed and given concrete form in art itself: such is the dynamic and provocative world of Adamo Macri. His drawing of a giant male figure howling embodies what I am saying here. It is the most overtly expressed of all the images, emitting power, almost quasi-mythic in its emergent and ravenous stance.

Macri’s art reveals an obsession with invisible reality, the vigour of the cell in all things almost going to the heart of the nuclei itself. Fully aware of body’s water and blood and the genetic basis of human identity, he becomes fascinated with the interruption of what would ordinarily constitute normal development. The "normal" endocrine secretions into the blood are stalled, interrupted, or transformed perhaps, accompanied by gender altering and experimentation, a liberation from biological determinism which lead to sexual transfiguration. Alteration and transformation, transmogrification by the magic genius of his art, as even the genetic facts of humanity are mutated in this context, morphology itself under the microscope: all illustrate aberrations of the human form, sometimes self-willed as in the deliberate drinking of poisons or socially inflicted, as in the absorption of a polluted atmosphere into the cells of nature. Such changes to the human form challenge ideologies of beauty and naturalness.

We think of the alluring statuary of classical Greece from which we derive our ideals of physical beauty, of human shape and proportions, confronted by its antithesis, the freakish which break down the classic norms of size, shape, texture, the perfect physique. Does the freak both repel and fascinate because he violates our standard views of correct appearance, of the body beautiful? Does a kind of ironic beauty emerge through the smog and noxious atmosphere of contemporary life? Macri ranges very far with an often restricted pallet and often focuses on minute details; for example, in the accumulated encrustations on a drain pipe, potentially disgusting, yet effectively beautiful, however strange. It seems to be an image of bubbling corrosion, but from an entirely different perspective it’s a depiction of life emergent in obscurity, life at the cellular level as the artist in his acute and fine perception sees it.
Macri’s art is not representational in the commonly understood sense of the term, even if a drain pipe can be recognized. Because he makes free and imaginative use of all media available to him, his art infiltrates the imagination and penetrates dull perception for the purposes of transformation. What might seem to be images of chaos is really a subtly organized illumination of vibrant cellular activity. Macri does not wander into pure abstraction, for his work is as much welded to the concrete of the organic and the metallic as it the nebulous world of emotions, intimations and erotic impulses. For all its radical shifting of the banal and the expected, he is very interested in flesh and blood on various levels. Consequently, his work contains a kind of quivering, or may induce that kind of response in the viewer sensitive to his vision, a fleshy response if there ever was one. Broadly speaking without pointing to a specific image, Macri’s collective body of work can merge into and become inextricable from the viewer’s own flesh and blood.

Prolonged exposure to the riveting details of his images leads to their becoming fixed in the mind which produces a curious desire to see more. For cells by nature proliferate and in the act of stirring may well mutate, become something else, or engender more of their kind. Life is happening at the cellular level in his art which explains the orgasmic burgeoning effect of the implications in Adamo Macri’s images. He builds upon physiological facts and creates a vision derived from the unobserved and disregarded microcosms surrounding us, imbuing them with the eroticism of swiftly moving lines, curves and muscle, hidden energy and overt power. The phenomenon of unimpeded growth and the power of possession, whorling and curling, which almost reflects the structure of the brain itself, or the unfurling of the seed, the ejaculation of a life force.

The structural basis to many of the Still Life images often depend upon the recurrence of similar forms. They create an intriguing melding between the organic and inorganic, between inert metal made alive by encrustations of cellular energy, between electricity and flesh, as if re-creating life forms. So, how interesting that the name of the artist is Adamo, given to him at birth and not later adopted, which means dust, the very beginning of life, mythologically speaking. The name reminds us that the artist has entered the world of microcosms to see what is there and how it embodies life in the process of beginning. From obsession with the minuscule, Macri looms large and the images collectively depict the poetry of burgeoning. He is aware, to revert to a Romantic conception of the origins of life, of electricity charging the very cell of things.

These unfamiliar but vibrantly strange and seductive images subtly transform the viewer who is lingering long over them, seeking to follow the tensions of the lines, to be whorled and curled among the structures, to enter the apertures and orifices so prolific throughout the works. We are indeed affected by what we behold. One of the functions of Macri’s art surely is to cut through the barriers, to present to us our hidden selves at the cellular level. Perhaps it allows us to identify with the howling giant shattering repression and biological determinism, as well as the artist breaking free from the artistic limitations of traditional forms and methods.

Macri does not, however, remain static in his work. There’s an almost frenetic energy in the various photos, installations, drawings, which suggests that the artist is fully aware of the contradictory, the conflicting, the many parallel identities within the human psyche. I can see the labyrinthine in his images, the sense of always entering, penetrating, probing, not fully revealing, but embracing the sensual and the sensuous simultaneously, not so much to define what is, but to tease out its essence. There’s a delving into the grey areas of existence, for black and white are too reductive and inimical to Macri’s vision and spirit.

He resides in the world of the indistinct or the half-hidden; desire felt but unspoken; the breath of the panther on the poet's mind, if you will; the soundless spinning of the planets which the ancients claimed made music; the intimations of ravenous desire which itself curls and whorls within the cellular, circumambulating corridors of the labyrinth, an image of the paradoxical wonders of the mind and body. The art contains multitudes of grey and provokes reactions of many and varied sorts, for it elicits and probes, transgresses and seduces, leading to hitherto unfelt experiences. Macri’s art, for all its emphasis on biology, remains a mystery as it is so inextricably connected with mind and desire. His images of exquisite intimations deeply penetrate the cells of the mind where desire thrives and yearns in shades of grey.

The energy of thriving cells and yearning structures in this intense, usually hidden world of creation and re-creation increases appetite. The hungers of life must be satisfied, or even the cell, the basis of existence, perishes. Given Macri’s predilection for greys or a deliberately limited choice of colours and tones, I think of specters of desire under a tree, wafting in a grey cloud chamber, the unfulfilled, aching to feel the compulsions of true life. There are suggestions of a greater field of unknown experience which remains unspoken, or possibly unspeakable, and a sense of potential destruction followed by inevitable re-creation. Macri's fine artistic power arouses and recognizes pre-existent thirst and yet instills the desire for more. It drives the mind into a whorl of expectations, invades and possesses through the energy of line and the subtlety of colour and the brilliant use of various media. Simultaneously his art rips out the old heart to make room for the new, and to celebrate a cosmos in the unnoticed.

Adamo Macri is above all an artist always in the process of probing and re-designing. The art is unseen life itself: the compulsions of fantasy, endless in the making; unspoken desires thriving and yearning in the deepest shades of silent grey; hidden fomentations and anxieties of mutations we cannot control. He creates scenarios of transgressive beauty. Moral norms and ordinary perceptions are deliberately violated as provocative sensations and new modes of expression emerge from the whirlpool of cellular energy and life.

Kenneth Radu is the author of a dozen books, including story collections, novels, poetry, and one memoir. His first collection of short fiction, The Cost of Living, was nominated for the Governor General’s Award. He has twice won the Quebec Writers’ Federation Best English-Language fiction award for A Private Performance and Distant Relations. His work has also been shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Journey Prize. In the spring of 2010, DC Books (Canada) published his latest book, Sex in Russia: New & Selected Stories.

Adamo Macri: Still Life, Alba Parts and Spout

2010-09-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

Song of Flesh and Blood (Observations of Body Identity)
This exhibition represents three artists (Adamo Macri, Daphne Hill, Kat Schneck) that are examining ideas of the body identity within and outside of culture.

Three video works by Adamo Macri titled Still Life, Alba Parts and Spout.

Spout is an animated video short based on a drawing and poem written by Macri in 2001, dedicated to Swedish director Ingmar Bergman in acknowledgement and gratitude for his contribution to film. Both the original drawing and poem were created as an immediate reaction to watching Bergman's films, specifically the psychological horror The Hour of the Wolf (1968). Spout was created in 2006, one year before Bergman’s death.

The poem was originally written in English then translated into German. Macri utilizes German deliberately as an antonymic language to Italian, his mother tongue. The Italian language is generally considered fluid and melodic, akin to fluid brush strokes, whereas the German language features a more bold or harsh sound to the ear, with a more chiseled edge to its tone. Macri’s choice of German also reflects the geographic and cultural proximity to the Swedish language, as this relates to the director’s nationality and cultural roots.
For the voice in the poem, Macri chose an elderly German woman, a choice that represents a diametrical and obvious contrast to Macri’s own age and gender. Spout (2006) 02:15

Dreadful things can happen
The fence is near
Thermal springs may dry
You must understand
The culprit calls out in despair
Answer me
Question my chorus over again
How many strokes do you want?
How many do we deserve?
I declare
You've lost your way
Divert yourselves to the puppet show
The exquisite corpse
Please
Divert yourselves to the puppet show

Alba is short for Albaformisnumeric, a concept born of Macri’s initial motivation to draw a figure that would be held accountable for transmuting vector symbols such as words or numbers into matter, similar to the power demonstrated by mythological characters. Alba was created to symbolize a character with the power to dramatically transform our state of being, similar to the function and effect of sexual hormones upon the human body.

With the intention of creating a quadruped form that symbolized a figure of fertility with raging hormones, Macri made several drawings in various sections and parts. He began with sketching the back view and several critical features that needed to be incorporated as part of her form before the front view was determined and Alba was finalized.

The intent of the work was to develop a form or model resembling a complex external bodily organ, representing both testosterone and estrogen in a mélange of mechanical and organic elements. Alba is ultimately a mythological sort of Venus with powers that relate to Macri’s ex nihilo equation that represents the manifestation of a metaphysical process. The equation sequence is as follows:

0 = nothing
1 = one cell
2 = the splitting action of one cell into two equal parts
8 = addressing chasm as an empty yet viral area for possibilities to thrive in

The equation describes an expansion similar to the stages of procreation or gestation, when a single cell or seed begins to materialize. The ex nihilo equation reflects Macri’s obsession with the genesis of an idea and the reactive process of conceptualization as it begins in the mind, then transfers roughly onto paper, and lastly becomes tangible sculpture in actual physical form. Alba Parts (2007) 03:09

The Still Life video project illustrates the conceptual process of Macri's Still Life photographic installation, showing the storyboard sketches dissolving into sculptural pieces. Designed as a multiframe photographic piece, the original installation consists of 18 images across 18 rows, totaling 324 different frames.

The idea for Still Life originates with a rusty bathroom drainpipe, which has been out of use for some time. Due to numerous past attempts at unclogging it with various chemical and commercial products, elaborate calcified formations of gunk have occurred, and organic substances have seeped through eroded oxidized areas.

The pipe represents a vectorial aspect, as in "close to nothingness," easily overlooked or insignificant. This seemingly diffident object is actually the site of a thriving microcosmic ecosystem, sowing organic breakout from a seemingly inert entity. There are numerous examples of microcosmic worlds perceived as dry or inert while in reality thriving: dust particles are generally dismissed as lifeless, but in actual fact carry a complex and organic ecosystem. Within this concept of the negligible microscopic world is the idea of alpha, the beginning of something, and the abstract of holding it accountable both for its own proper demise or cyclical end, and the end it initiates externally, such as the illness and potential for death carried by viruses and bacteria. How can something so small be so fatal? Still Life parallels this idea found in nature, employing composition and visual narrative to explore a toxic ecosystem thriving within a delicate environment. In such thought-provoking microcosmic systems that internalize the cycle of alpha and omega, the beginnings of life and what can cause it to end are both too small to be visible by the human eye.

Due to the nature of the multiframe process, the human eye is compelled to scan through the images quickly. Conversely to film, where each frame is projected singularly and the scene unfolds progressively, the Still Life photographic installation exposes all frames and scenes simultaneously. The eye can scan the rows of stills at a very fast pace. This references another element of the toxic environment, what Macri describes as its sojournal nature, a concept that ties into a contaminated area’s character, wherein the toxins quickly transgress each element, every frame being temporarily and briefly present.

An important element to understanding Still Life is Macri’s unique standpoint on sculpture, the belief that the idea alters the perception of the tangible object. There is a tension created between sculpture as a three-dimensional event and the practice of anti-sculpture, based upon perceiving sculpture as an occurrence and not static presence. The artist defines it as “an ephemeral three-dimensional occurrence, located at a specific point, which conjures up atemporal art.” Still Life (2006) 03:36

Garage 4141 Alabama Street San Diego, California 92104
Saturday September 18, 2010
Opening Reception 6:00 - 9:00pm
View Poster
Discover SD
(PDF)

Adamo Macri: Sazmanab Project - Iran

2010-09-07T06:23:00.000-07:00

Human Emotion Project
هنرمندان معاصر با استفاده از فیلم و ویدئو
Adamo Macri (One Onion Canon)
Sazmanab Project
September 11, 2010
6:30 - 9:00pm
(View Poster)

Adamo Macri: Mohsen Art Gallery - Iran

2010-09-03T07:59:00.000-07:00

Human Emotion Project (22 International Artists)
هنرمندان معاصر با استفاده از فیلم و ویدئو
Adamo Macri (One Onion Canon)
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
6:30 - 9:00pm
Mohsen Art Gallery
No. 42 East Mina Blvd. Farzan Street, Nadji Street, Zafar, Tehran, Iran
ISNA: Tehran Culture and Arts
(View Poster)

Adamo Macri: Song of Flesh and Blood

2010-08-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

Song of Flesh and Blood
(Observations of Body Identity)

This exhibition represents three artists that are examining ideas of the body identity within and outside of culture. Adamo Macri, Daphne Hill and Kat Schneck.

“All these convexities and orifices have a common characteristic; it is within them that the confines between the body and the world are overcome; there is an interchange and an interorientation. This is why they remain event of and in the life of the grotesque body, the acts of the bodily drama, take place in this sphere. Eating, drinking, defecation and other (sweating, blowing of the nose, sneezing), as well as copulation, pregnancy, dismemberment, swallowing up by another body and the outer world, or on the confines of the old and new body. In all these events the beginning and end of life are closely linked and interwoven.”
Milhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World)

Adamo Macri - Video art titles: Spout, Still Life, Alba Parts.

(PDF)
(View Poster)

Garage 4141 Alabama Street San Diego, California 92104
September 18, 2010
Opening Reception 6-9pm
Discover SD

Adamo Macri - Contemporary Art Fair Beijing

2010-07-11T11:34:00.000-07:00

Adamo Macri Art Beijing 2010

View more presentations from Adamo Macri.

Adamo Macri (One Onion Canon) Video Art
Curated by José Drummond for Artists Cinema
Beijing Contemporary Art Fair 2010
China Agricultural Exhibition Center
ARTIST CINEMA
www.artbeijing.net

Adamo Macri: HEP2010 Paris France

2010-05-29T08:23:00.000-07:00

Human Emotion Project: Paris
22 & 23 July 2010
Adamo Macri: One Onion Canon

Galerie Younique 6 Avenue de la Soeur Rosalie 75013 Paris
younique-art.co

Adamo Macri: Culture Center Laaksola

2010-05-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

HEP 2010 Finland - Laaksola Culture Center
Laaksola Kulttuurikeskus Ryödintie 2, Toijala, Finland

July 1-30, 2010
Private View: June 30, 2010 @ 19:00
Adamo Macri: One Onion Canon
Facebook
View Map

Adamo Macri: FACES - Portugal

2010-05-01T13:32:00.000-07:00

HEP 2010 Installation - Portugal
FACES
4 Channel Video Installation
Adamo Macri: SLIDE
7 - 15 May 2010

Gonçalves Sapinho Cultural Center
Rua do Centro Comunitário Apartado 197 2476-901
Benedita - Alcobaça - Portugal

Curator: Alberto Guerreiro
Director: Alison Williams

Adamo Macri: Beijing Contemporary Art Fair

2010-04-28T07:46:00.000-07:00

Beijing Contemporary Art Fair
China Agricultural Exhibition Center
ARTIST CINEMA
Adamo Macri: One Onion Canon
April 29 - May 2, 2010
www.artbeijing.net

Co-organizers:
译象 ET-AC Yi Xiang ET-AC
北京大学视觉与图像研究中心 Centre for Visual Studies Peking University
中国影像艺术2010年展项目组 2010 Chinese Screenage Art Exhibition
中国影像艺术论坛项目组 Chinese Screenage Art Forum
C空间 C-Space
阿拉里奥北京 Arario Beiji

PARAKINO - Adamo Macri

2010-04-22T07:22:00.000-07:00

HEP Poland 2010 - PARAKINO
Adamo Macri: SLIDE

6 MAY 2010 @ 18:00
Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art
Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Łaźnia
ul.Jaskółcza 1, 80-767 Gdańsk

Curator: Michał Brzeziński
www.laznia.pl
Gdańsk
PostVideoArt

Participating Artists:
German Britch, Larry Caveney, Michael Chang, Maryam Fakhimi, Sue-Pam Grant, Alberto Guerreiro, Jerry King, Adamo Macri, Bill Millett, Pekka Ruuska, Anders Weberg, Alison Williams.

HEP2010 Geneva - Adamo Macri

2010-04-16T10:47:00.000-07:00

Human Emotion Project
Adamo Macri: One Onion Canon
APRIL 30, 2010
IVAZION
Rue de Genève 1, Geneva, Switzerland

Adamo Macri - The Clandestine Series

2010-03-13T11:12:00.000-08:00

The Clandestine Series @ DigitalSouls

Adamo Macri: I wanted to create a body of work that placed importance on negative space. Not necessarily a role reversal, but a balance ... (Read)

Adamo Macri: Talks About Soliloquy

2010-02-16T07:23:00.000-08:00

About Soliloquy

Adamo Macri : I cast Lola, a transgendered she-male, without meeting her, for a different project I'm currently developing entitled Armed. I was forewarned by a few who know her well that she was a strong and challenging personality to contend with, but it was clear in my mind that Lola was the only one for the part. It was when she arrived at the studio that I began to suspect that something other than Armed was going to happen. The critical moment occurred while getting acquainted with her during the makeup session before the photoshoot. It felt like I was speaking to someone who was contained within a body, the surface of which felt very much external, as if an eclipsed "other" was governing the physical being, over and above her uncanny presence as a kind of manufactured hybrid sexual object. I immediately thought of how it must have felt when Da Vinci first met La Gioconda, or when John Waters first saw Divine, or even when the concept of Frankenstein first popped into Mary Shelley's imagination. At that moment, it became clear to me that Soliloquy needed to be made.

HEP 2010 BEIJING

2010-01-14T09:38:00.000-08:00

AFA BEIJING

Beijing Contemporary Art Centre

The exhibition will be divided in 4 sections, which will run simultaneously in 4 different rooms.

Adamo Macri
One Onion Canon (2007)
Duration: 05:51
Music composed by: Índios Eletrônicos (André Ramiro & João XXIII)
Recorded by: Carlos Zubeck
Song Title: Morainas

1 ArtBase, "Beijing 318 Art Garden" East 6-3, Hegezhuang Village, Cuigezhuang Township, Chaoyang District, Beijing China
16 January - 14 March 2010
Opening hours: 12:00 - 18:00
Closed Mondays
artnow.com.cn

The term "video" commonly covers a vast range of activities, including feature films on video tape, music videos, home video recordings, closed circuit video surveillance, corporate and information video, video used for legal evidence in the police and court systems, television, internet, and, we shouldn't forget video art in all its manifestations.

We can link the word "video" to specific objects like videotape or video cameras and obvious related practices and as much as there is heterogeneity of practices, which go under the same name, the purposes are as diverse - showing that the term is archaic and that "video" is a hybrid medium in constant transformation.

This current uncertainty about the role and nature of "video" and the inclusion of disciplinary boundaries is linked to a broader crisis in knowledge, a characteristic of our times.
The displacement of the traditional culture by the rise of a spectacular image suggests that as much as video offers a new kind of object, it is also part of a profound transformation of the social and cultural conditions within which is produced.

The various manifestations of Video Art throughout the last 40 years provide us an alternative parallel timetable where unquestionably were eliminated the concerns, techniques and problems inherited from more academic art forms. In most cases, the artists who use video developed a process of exploration and reduction, by the elimination of all extrinsic characteristics until they arrive at what is, presumably, a core, an essence.

The assumption that by stripping the medium down to its unique features will lead us to its innermost core, its own proper identity is just one side of the question. It is for the artist to trace a concern, not so much for limiting the specificity of different media, but for understanding their interrelationships. In other words, video artists today are most often interested in the hybrid rather than the pure, in transformation and intersection rather than discrete and stable boundaries.
Video is, therefore, one of the most prolific visual mediums in use today.
Contributions from the extensive collection of the Human Emotion Project, founded and directed by the South African artist Alison Williams, give Macau a selection that links together more than 40 voices from all over the world.

"Paradox", "Loss & Desire", "Transformation" and "Fantasy" are the chosen themes for understanding video art, its own multiplicity and reunion around the imaginative subject of The Human Emotion Project (HEP).

The artists in "Paradox" investigate the contradictions between documentary and performance, fact and fiction, order & chaos. What is real and what is staged? The absurdity of real life, the ambiguity of movement and the enigma of space are some of the perceptions raised in "Paradox".

Dave Swensen (Until Death Parts Us) - USA
Nicole Rademacher (Walk With Me) - USA
Khairy Hirzalla (Looking for) - Jordan
Hakan Akcura (Catharsis) - Turkey/Sweden
Larry Caveney (Arm Wresting Intervention) - USA
Kim Miller (Thanx for Meeting Me Here) - USA
Vienne Chan (Nightdance) - Hong Kong/Canada
Basmati Corpus (Tracks) - Italy
Irina Gabiani (Samaia or Triamazikamno) - Luxembourg
Xenia Vargova (Tutu) - Bulgaria
Ng Fong Chao (Redemption) - Macau

"Loss & Desire" explores the ambiguity of misplaced feelings from philosophical aspects to the emotional. The strong deficit of engagement, the desire for connection and the interior struggle for clarity are present in each work.

Gaia Bartolini (Unseen Dialogue) - Italy
Daniel Chavez (Self Examination – I Am Nothing) - USA
Michael Douglas Hawk (Bubble Girl) - Germany
Richard Jochum (Mama) – Austria/USA
Alison Williams (Cage-panic) - RSA
Debbie Douez (Two in One) - Spain
Manfred Marburger (Proud) - UK
Gili Avissar (Self portrait-Dead artist) - Israel
Jose Drummond (The Illusionist) – Portugal/Macau
Masha Yozefpolsky (Deep Freeze) Israel
Bianca Lei (Won Ton noodles, I love…… IT !) - Macau

The power of "Transformation" is a vibrant and integral part of all of our lives. The mystery of life forever changing, the spirituality of isolated gestures and sounds and the manipulation of these elements compose a space of reflection and intimacy.

Amina Bech (Tranquility Inverted) - Norway
Bill Millett (The Book) - UK
Anders Weberg (Undisclosed beauty) - Sweden
Glenn Church (Fragility) - UK
Alison Williams & Anders Weberg (Mirror Mirror) - RSA/Sweden
Christy Walsh (Isolation) - USA
Alberto Guerreiro (Transcendent) - Portugal
Alicia Felberbaum (There and Back) - UK
Sue Pam-Grant (Portrait) - RSA
Danny Germansen (Alienation & loneliness) - Denmark
Alice Kok (The Duet) - Macau

"Fantasy" draws inspiration from the apparent fascination of lively graphic imagery. The looping of the modern era, the provocation of literature, the encounter with the fantastical and the employment of technology contribute to the process making of these visual stories.

Adamo Macri (One Onion Canon) - Canada
Ebert Brothers (Bluescape) - Germany
Verena Stenke & Andrea Pagnes (Crossing) - Italy
Robertina Sebjanic (Bubble) - Slovenia
Niclas Hallberg (The Crying Man) - Sweden
Michael Chang (Concerto Azzurro) - Denmark
Paolo Bonfiglio (Mater) - Italy
João Ricardo (Scarleet) - Portugal
Cindy Ng (Walking) - China

Copyright 2006-2008 All Rights Reserved AFA A-N-D DESIGN 京ICP备10003299号

HEP 2009 Global Exhibitions

2009-12-14T08:14:00.001-08:00

Festival Video DiaLoghi - HEP Torino Italy

2009-12-12T07:20:00.000-08:00

Human Emotion Project: Torino Italy

Festival Video DiaLoghi
14 - 21 December 2009

Cinema Massimo Sala 3 – Museo del Cinema
Velan Centro d'arte Contemporanea
Galerja Dimenzija Napredka Nova Gorica Slovenia
Via Modena 52 10153 Torino Italia

Curators: Willy Darko, Alison Williams, Michael Chang, Nataša Kovšca
PDF
Poster
Artist List

Adamo Macri: HEP Macau China

2009-11-06T11:57:00.001-08:00

AFA @ Portuguese Bookshop Gallery Macau
Livraria Portuguesa, Rua de S. Domingos No. 18, Macau
14 November - 12 December 2009
Hours: 11:00 to 19:00
Media: Video
Curator: José Drummond

Macau Daily Times
Asia Art Archive
Delta Bridges
Artcitizens
Macau 24
facebook: Exhibit
facebook: AFA Macau
Poster

Sguardi Sonori Festival: Benevento

2009-10-28T09:51:00.001-07:00

Sguardi Sonori Festival
Festival of Media and Time Based Art

Benevento Italy 6 November - 31 December 2009
Rocca Dei Rettori
Piazza 4 Novembre, 82100 Benevento BN, Italia

Human Emotion Project @ Sguardi Sonori Festival
Collaboration with Faticart Group & curated by Carlo Fatigone - Association of Contemporary Art - organization of events and festivals of:
ELECTRONIC MUSIC, SOUN INSTALLATIONS & PERFORMANCES, CONTEMPORARY ART (NetArt), VIDEO ART, INDIPENDENT CINEMA, ABSTRACT CINEMA.

HEP Portugal Malhoa: Adamo Macri

2009-10-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

Human Emotion Project - International Artists Using Film & Video
HEP Portugal 2009 - Emoção Humana - Video Arte Internacional

Corpus - The Body Outside the Mind (Sculpture Room)
Adamo Macri: One Onion Canon

Museu José Malhoa
Parque Dom Carlos I 2500-109 Caldas da Rainha Portugal
20 - 25 October 2009
10h00 - 12h30 | 14h00 - 17h00

Evening Projection & Conference by art professor Fernando Galrito
Thursday 22 October @ 21h00. This event will be by invitation only.

PDF
Jornal Das Caldas
Daily Digital
RDB ruadebaixo.com

Instituto de Museus e da Conservação (IMC)
Museu José Malhoa (MJM)
IPL – Escola Superior de Artes e Design das Caldas-da-Rainha (ESAD.CR)
Museu do Hospital e das Caldas – Centro Hospitalar do Oeste Norte
mjm.imc-ip.pt

Optica Festival Madrid

2009-10-09T11:50:00.000-07:00

Optica Festival Madrid 2009
Espacio Espora
Embajadores, 35
28012 Madrid
15 - 17 October 2009

Human Emotion Project [HEP2009]
Parte 1a: Adamo Macri
Jueves 15 de Octubre, a las 19h:00
PDF: Optica Madrid 2009

Sguardi Sonori Festival

2009-10-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

Sguardi Sonori Festival
Festival of Media and Time Based Art

Rome Italy 3-18 October 2009
Frascati Scuderie Aldobrandini per l'Arte Contemporanea
Piazza Marconi 6, 00044 Frascati Roma Italia

Human Emotion Project @ Sguardi Sonori Festival
Collaboration with Faticart Group & curated by Carlo Fatigone - Association of Contemporary Art - organization of events and festivals of:

ELECTRONIC MUSIC, SOUN INSTALLATIONS & PERFORMANCES, CONTEMPORARY ART (NetArt), VIDEO ART, INDIPENDENT CINEMA, ABSTRACT CINEMA.

Optica Festival Paris

2009-09-21T07:43:00.001-07:00

Optica Festival Paris
September 24 - 26 2009

Lieu d'Optica Paris 2009
Collège d'Espagne - Cité Universitaire Internationale
Sala Luis Buñuel - 7e et 17 bd Jourdan - 75014 Paris

Human Emotion Project - Optica Paris
Programme #8: Adamo Macri
Vendredi 25 Septembre @ 19h:00
PDF: Optica Paris 2009

Optica Festival Córdoba

2009-09-06T08:46:00.000-07:00

Optica Festival: 10 - 12 September 2009
Festival Internacional de Videoarte - Córdoba
Filmoteca de Andalucia - Espacio 3
C/ Medina Y Cordella, 5 Córdoba, Spain

Start Time: Thursday, Sept 10 @ 6:00pm
End Time: Sunday, Sept 13 @ 12:00am

Human Emotion Project at Optica:
Irina Gabiani, Debbie Douez, Robertina Sebjanic & Nika Autor, Alberto Guerreiro, Osvaldo Cibils, Christy Walsh, Karina Smigla-Bobinski, Eduardo Cuadrado, Richard Jochum, Adamo Macri, Alison Williams, Masha Yozefpolsky, Anders Weberg, Pablo de Castro, Paolo Bonfiglio, Marty McCutcheon, Vienne Chan, Jose Drummond, Michael Chang, Tim White-Sobieski, Leme 42, Debbie Douez, Tatiana de Luxe, Tristan Mory, Glenn Church, Roy LaGrone, Ektoras Binikos, Álvaro Perez Mulas, Gaia Bartolini, John Benneth, Niclas Hallberg, Mads Ljungdahl, José Luis Pajares, Alicia Felberbaum, Ebert Brothers.
PDF: Optica Cordoba 2009

Optica Art Fairs

HEP SWEDEN: Adamo Macri

2009-08-20T07:10:00.000-07:00

HEP SWEDEN
FORMVERK ART ZONE
29 Aug - 26 Sept 2009
Adamo Macri: SLIDE & One Onion Canon
Curators: Niclas Hallberg & Stina Pehrsdotter
www.formverk.se

Human Emotion Project is a global video project directed by Alison Williams. Artists from around the world are invited to interpret human emotions and inner experiences using the moving image. The project invites international curators to make their selection of the works to be shown at their respective local venues. Formverk Art Zone has chosen to present a month long exhibition, on a large scale projection with selected works on rotation. HEP 2009 has screened at numerous events, festivals and museums in Europe and will continue to spread globally with planned shows in China, Iran, Georgia, USA, Turkey and Canada.

HEP Macau Exhibition Rescheduled

2009-08-05T06:14:00.001-07:00

HEP 2009 Macau China

2009-07-21T08:27:00.000-07:00

HEP 2009 Macau: 8 Aug - 4 Sept 2009
AFA Portuguese Bookshop Gallery - Galeria da Livraria Portuguesa
板樟堂街18號 - Rua de S.Domingos 18

Facebook: AFA Macau
Curator: José Drummond

HEP 2009 PORTUGAL

2009-04-26T09:14:00.000-07:00

HEP 2009 PORTUGAL. Documented visually by international artists using film or video. Amongst the artists selected, Adamo Macri's video piece OOC [One Onion Canon] was chosen by curator Alberto Guerreiro for this one night open-air event. As part of Museum International Day on May 16, 2009 in the Gardens of the Ceramic Museum. 21:00 - 22:00 and 23:00 - 24:00 Screening Program

Museu Da Cerâmica
Quinta do Visconte de Sacavém
Rua Dr. Ilídio Amado
2504-910 Caldas da Rainha Portugal

Instituto dos Museus e da Conservação
Jornal das Caldas
Experimental Cinema
Hoje Macau
CULTURA Online
ARTslant Worldwide

Adamo Macri Slideshows

2009-04-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

View three slideshows: "Still Life" "EXUVIAE" and "SLIDE & OOC"
Adamo Macri's Presentations

HEP 2009 Travels to Spain

2009-04-05T07:26:00.000-07:00

HUMAN EMOTION PROJECT
April 17 - 26 2009
Opening Reception: 17 April @ 8:00 pm
Guided Showings: April 17, 18, 24, 25
Exhibition Showings: April 19 & 26

With the successful debut in Melbourne Australia and subsequent screenings in Rome, the Human Emotion Project has set ablaze, marking its early beginnings with unprecedented progression and global interest. With dates confirmed for an impressive world tour, the HEP organizers are proud to announce a new location for the 3rd edition of HEP 2009 in Cigüñuela Spain. Based on the nature and intrigue, the project is set to travel to more nonconventional locations of the art world, opening a broader visibility with a personalized cord for the public at large. HEP director Alison Williams along with local curator Debbie Douez, will bring the latest developments in contemporary video art, with a selection of international artists to LaSALA gallery, from April 17th through the 26th to Spain. Amongst the artists and part of the exhibition are Adamo Macri's video works "SLIDE" and "One Onion Canon". The two week event will include formal guided showings, round table discussions and public video works screening on rotation.
Artes Hoy
El Norte de Castilla
Arte Valladolid
Cylcultural
AVA Castilla Y León
Arte Informado

HEP 2009 Spain (PDF)
Triple Art Gallery

HEP 2009 Spain Poster

LaSALA Exposiciones Galería
La Riva 2 Bis 47191 Cigüñuela Valladolid España

HEP 2009 ITALY: Rome 2nd Screening

2009-03-20T07:37:00.001-07:00

HUMAN EMOTION PROJECT
4 April 2009 BRANCALEONE Via Levanna 13, Rome Italy

In collaboration with the Faticart Group, HEP Italy documented visually by international artists using film or video. This will be the second Rome screening of HEP Italy 2009. Amongst the artists selected, Adamo Macri's video piece OOC [One Onion Canon] was chosen by curators Carlo Fatigoni and Sandro Cecchi for this one-night event.
Arte Globale

HEP 2009 ITALY

2009-02-12T13:57:00.000-08:00

HUMAN EMOTION PROJECT
BRANCALEONE Via Levanna 13, Rome
Opening 14 March 2009 @ 21:30 pm

In collaboration with the Faticart Group, HEP Italy documented visually by international artists using film or video. This will be the second global physical screening of HEP 2009 at Brancaleone in Rome. Amongst the artists selected, Macri's video piece "SLIDE" was chosen by curators Carlo Fatigoni and Sandro Cecchi for this one-night event.
ARTABASE
ARTslant Worldwide
Exibart
eSquare Gallery Online
art a part of cult(ure)
PDF - HEP article Australia: MOMENTemagazine

Adamo Macri: HUMAN EMOTION PROJECT

2009-02-01T09:14:00.001-08:00

HUMAN EMOTION PROJECT
25 Feb - 08 March 2009
Opening Reception: 26 Feb @ 6:00 pm
Guildford Lane Gallery, Melbourne

Human Emotion Project documented visually by a diversity of artists using film or video. Selected international artists for the first physical screening in Australia and launch of HEP - Human Emotion Project. Two of Adamo Macri's video works, "SLIDE" and "One Onion Canon" will be screened as part of HEP 2009 Australia.
ARTABASE: Exhibitions Openings
ABC TV - Sunday Arts
ARTCALENDR
SAATCHI Online TV & Magazine
MOM ENTemagazine: Article on the project and participating artists.

Australian Art Review

Artipedia: Adamo Macri Interview

2009-01-15T08:12:00.000-08:00

The interview with Macri by Claudio Parentela has been picked up by Artipedia artsnews. Dated Jan.14.09. Interview with Montreal artist Adamo Macri. Other news articles include: Lithuanian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale presents Zilvinas Kempinas, and, One Day Sculpture: a New Zealand-wide series of temporary public artworks. Click on LINK to read the article.

The ANTIPASTO Project: Update

2009-01-13T13:42:00.000-08:00

A few more recent contributors to the ANTIPASTO project. Once again, Macri expresses his gratitude and thanks to the many generous artists who've participated to date.

Katarzyna Kozyra: is a Polish video artist. She graduated in 1993 from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art and received a Paszport Polityki award in 1997.
Dean and Britta: is a musical duo consisting of Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, both former members of Luna.
Karen Black: is an American actress, screenwriter, singer and songwriter. She is noted for films such as Five Easy Pieces, The Great Gatsby and Nashville in a career that has spanned five decades.
Alexi Worth: is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He attended Yale College (BA 1986) and Boston University (MFA 1993).
David Sherry: is an artist based in Glasgow, Scotland.
Keith Foti: Los Angeles based singer-songwriter and most notably a famous hair stylist who is referred to as Hair God.

Platform58 - Some Faces: Soliloquy

2008-12-21T08:14:00.000-08:00

Platform58 is a global art network, promoting all media and producing a monthly online magazine. Adamo Macri has recently completed and contributed new work to the Platform58 publication. The piece consists of two photographic images, side-by-side, entitled Soliloquy. One of the two has been published in the January 09, issue 003, as part of a group effort. This issue focuses on art based on "Some Faces" and can be viewed via the web link Platform58. To view Soliloquy (2008) click on Link.

ARMED: Currently in progress

2008-11-04T06:16:00.001-08:00

Currently in progress: Macri is in the mist of developing a new, eight piece series entitled ARMED. The individual title of each piece are listed below.

ARMED Didn't I Tell You - ARMED Malefactors - ARMED Prone to Failings - ARMED Waive the Right - ARMED Human Subject - ARMED Unanimous Hex - ARMED Wildlife in Captivity - ARMED Self-Representation

ANTIPASTO Contributors Update

2008-09-30T05:16:00.000-07:00

Here are more recent, additional contributors to ANTIPASTO. Macri is grateful for the kindness of all who have participated to date. Through their generosity, they have assisted in building the art project.

Scott King: graphic designer, worked as Art Director of i-D magazine, Creative Director of Sleazenation, King produces work under the banner CRASH!. He now works primarily as an artist and has exhibited world wide.

Rankin: (John Rankin Waddell) British portrait and fashion photographer, publisher and film director. He launched Dazed & Confused with business partner Jefferson Hack in 1991, RANK magazine in 2000. He also publishes Another Magazine and more recently Another Man.

Tura Santana: Femme fatale, exotic dancer, martial artist and actress best known for her iconic lead role as Varla in Russ Meyer’s film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!

Along with - John Baldessari, H.R. Giger, John Gilmore, Loretta Lux, Henry Rollins, Massimo Vitali, John Sinclair, Edward Ruscha, Barry Gifford, Michael Craig-Martin, Franko B, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Ron Athey, Ray Caesar, Ulrich Schnauss, Anthony Goicolea, Marcel Wanders, Jon Burgerman, Mel Ramos, David Ho, Tony Alva, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Michael Kenna, Carlos Betancourt, Annie Sprinkle, Terrence Koh, Anne van der Linden, Wang Qingsong, Dietmar Busse and Austin Young.

All other contributors are listed on the Tuesday, December 18, 2007 post, titled GET WHAT YOU ASK FOR.

Claudio Parentela: Interview with Adamo Macri

2008-08-01T18:06:00.000-07:00

Claudio Parentela is an artist and journalist who lives and works in Italy. He has collaborated and contributed to numerous webzines and international contemporary art publications. Interview with Adamo Macri (August 2008).
Newsvine.com
I On One: LIVE magazine.

Suburb Knead & It Is Customary

2008-07-18T11:53:00.000-07:00

Adamo Macri has completed a new, two piece photographic installation entitled Suburb Knead and It Is Customary. Web link

Clandestine

2008-07-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

Macri has completed new work entitled Clandestine, featuring Francois Sagat in a four piece series. Clandestine 0, Clandestine 1, Clandestine 2, Clandestine 8. French native Sagat is a model and adult entertainer, best known for his exotic and exceptional muscular physique. Three out of four pieces can only be viewed, till a full exhibition is organized, via the web link below.
Clandestine

Adamo Macri: GET WHAT YOU ASK FOR

2007-12-18T11:34:00.000-08:00

ANTIPASTO: Tribute to Andy Warhol for Little Electric Chair 1964. Antipasto is Adamo Macri's ambitious art project consisting of photographic pieces, performance and sculptural work. The photographic segment will be composed of celebrity portraits which will be generated by their individual reply to a question. The question: "If you were an institutionalized prisoner on death row and granted any meal of your choice, what would your last supper be?" The reply is referred to as the order. Macri's objective here is exploiting a different approach to the practice of portraiture. The depiction of an individual's physicality does not form the visual, rather the image is derived by their most favourite meal and what they consume. He challenges portraiture by expanding the process to organic narrative and regarded as intimate content. He has been fortunate to acquire many orders in person on a portable tape recorder, which is very effective because the response obtained reflects the spontaneous nature of the interviewee’s reply, given the brief amount of time between question and answer. As it is obviously impossible to record everyone in person due to geographical reasons, he uses other methods to retrieve this information, such as e-mail, phone calls or written invitations.

Pleased to announce, Orders received by:
Warren Fischer [Fischerspooner], Luke Slater, Sarah Maple, Raine Maida, Karim Rashid, Floria Sigismondi

David LaChapelle, Kiera Chaplin, Korban & Flaubert, Sandro [Miller], Peter Hook [New Order], Thomas Beale, Edland Man, Chris Anthony, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mr. Olympia Gunter Schlierkamp, Randall Slavin

Cheryl Dunn, Cheyenne Jackson, Stefano Cagol, Jim Lee, Ian Ayres,
Adam Broomberg [Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin], Carlos Alomar, Peter Walsh,
Jeffrey Milstein, Bryan Cassiday, Laurie Lipton, Elinor Carucci, Adi Nes

Steven Severin [Siouxsie & the Banshees], Warwick Saint, Max Hirshfeld, David Faustino, Damon Gameau, Carli Hermes, Rune Olsen, David Vance, Sean Kennedy Santos, Matthias Herrmann, Steve Conte [New York Dolls]

Amanda Lepore, Jeff Pickel, Andre Birleanu, Romi Dames, Barry Eisler, Jamie Hayon, Knut Larsson, Mike Garson, Andrew James Jones, Claudia Kunin, Anthony Lister, Catherine Tafur, Chadwick Tyler, Kobi Israel

John Casey, Laura Hughes, Marcelo Krasilcic, Andrew Yee, Ben Dunbar-Brunton, Karine Laval, Arthur Lynn, Onibaka, Roberto De Luna, Jeffrey Brown, Joe Ambrose, Poppy De Villeneuve

Nathan Sawaya, Richard Moon, Monica Majoli, Howie Pyro, Thomas Metcalf, Gibson Haynes, Lennie Lee, Max Andersson, Bodo Korsig, Nigel Poor, Dennis van Doorn, Peter Granser, Willem Kerseboom, Stuart Pearson Wright

Alnis Stakle, Clifford Bailey, Charles Cohen, Joy Goldkind, Virgil Brill, Eliza Geddes, Zachary Zavislak, Jean Jacques Andre, AA Bronson, Monika Behrens, Alessandro Bavari, Raphael Neal, German Herrera

Tim Hailand, Narcis Virgiliu, Eric Kellerman, James Higginson, Maria Lomholdt, Chris Bucklow, Martin McMurray, Sadegh Tirafkan, Rick Castro, Tune Andersen, David Creedon, Lisa Holden, Mariana Monteagudo

Miriam Cabessa, Gilles de Beauchene, Rene Bosch, Michael A. Salter, Adam Makarenko, Nicholas Di Genova, Sanford Biggers, Jesus Villa, Robin Williams, Tim Sullivan, Mitsy Groenendijk, Deborah Hamon

Chris Mars, Priya Ray, David Ford, Jean Roman Seyfried, Natalie Lanese, Justin Kaswan, Adela Leibowitz, Eric Yahnker, John Leigh, Ric Woods, Aaron Van Dyke, Boris Hoppek, Ed Radford, Hazel Dooney, Joyce Tenneson

Fay Ku, Nathaniel Stern, Jason Atomic, Scott Yeskel, Rami Maymon, D. Dominick Lombardi, Adam Dugas, Markus Redl, Trine Lise Nedreaas, Tom Hunter, Anthony Gayton, Susan Jamison, Joseph Sinclair, Sarah Bereza, Matt Furie

Matteo Bosi, Shauna Born, Cindy Greene, Ted Noten, Justin Francavilla, Tony Moore, David Harry Stewart, Juliana Sohn, Max Von Essen, Sara Schneckloth, Thierry Bisch, Caniglia, Yuko Shimizu, Christopher Cosnowski, Daryl Waller

Daryoush Asgar & Elisabeth Gabriel, Glen Hanson, Jeremy Geddes, Mary Jane Ansell, Richard Deacon, Roberta Nitsos, Roger Ballen, Zan Jbai, Jesse Leroy Smith, Karin Hanssen, Rachel Mason, Kenny Kenny.

Antipasto Essay Outline [Read]

Arts News Canada

2007-11-09T07:27:00.000-08:00

November 9, 2007
Arts News Canada Featured Artist: Adamo Macri, Montreal, Quebec
One Onion Canon: Poster (Photographic Installation)

Multimedia artist Adamo Macri is based in Montreal, Canada. Specific themes interweave through Adamo's art, such as the notion of procreation. He investigates form without parameters, fashioned through amalgamation of disparate components. He works with the idea of film and its use of multiple stills to evoke motion, time and evolution. The occurrence of motion and evolution examined through his art is also symbolic of the human condition. Macri has been showcased at Random Arts & Entertainment, Absolute Lomo, FRAME, in addition to having captured the attention of Susan Zadeh editor-in-chief of Eyemazing magazine. His latest projects entitled Slide and One Onion Canon are part of an online exhibit which involve video and photographic pieces which run from Oct. 31. to Dec. 25. 2007.

Online Exhibit Adamo Macri

2007-10-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

Adamo Macri's latest works SLIDE and One Onion Canon which involve both video and photographic pieces in an online exhibition. The videos and two of the photographic works can be viewed from Oct.31st to Dec.25th, through the corresponding web link below.
Online Exhibit.

EXUVIAE

2007-07-17T18:49:00.000-07:00

EXUVIAE is a short film illustrating the development process of concept art. Macri's ongoing approach to documenting sculpture as action or event involving multiple photographic images.

ONE ONION CANON

2007-05-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

In 1946 film critic Nino Frank first applied the term Film Noir to some of the films Hollywood was producing during the period. Discussions of Noir often centre on visual and specifically cinematic elements such as chiaroscuro, extreme camera angles and expressionist distortion. Both literary and cinematic Noir are defined by the subjective point of view, the shifting roles of the protagonist, the ill-fated relationship between the protagonist and society, generating the themes of alienation and entrapment. One Onion Canon is part of a series of new works by Adamo Macri attributing Noir, involving the moving image and photographic pieces. He points out different aspects of this project as follows: First, ascribe to the dark impulse and mindset of Noir as this will dictate mood and esthetics. A filmic mise en scène approach to portraiture and the relationship between static and motion. A traplike state of consciousness versus the imperiled beauty which distills from it.

DUPLEX DRILL

2007-05-01T13:38:00.001-07:00

Adamo Macri's Duplex Drill being featured at Culture TV. A film short illustrating the development process of a photographic project which consists of multiple images. Every individual's state of being changes significantly during the course of one single day, due to the evolutionary nature of the human psyche and the constant adaptation to environment and mood. As a result, what one considers palatable in the morning does not necessary appeal in the afternoon or evening. The route traced by these transitions is what he refers to as a "drill", epitomized by his slogan, "If you catch me at the right time, I might be in the mood." or "Become what you eat", this phrase is derived from his belief that the eventual use or consumption of the art dictates the final form and content.

SLIDE

2007-04-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

SLIDE, 2007 Photographic & Video (duration 5:04 mins). The three elements which compose SLIDE described by Adamo: Image + Noir Canon + Word.

VERBOTEN

2007-04-20T18:10:00.000-07:00

To view VERBOTEN, click on the image.
VERBOTEN: Adamo Macri 2007

ANTIPASTO ESSAY OUTLINE

2007-04-01T17:05:00.000-07:00

DVblog Random Arts and Entertainment

2007-04-01T06:39:00.001-07:00

04.01.07 | Two short movies by Adamo Macri being featured at DVblog Random Arts and Entertainment.
• Still Life: The development process of Adamo Macri's photographic piece entitled Still Life. An animated sequence illustrating the making of an artwork which consists of multiple images. Preliminary sketches dissolving into the final photographs, hinting the nature of the work.
• Spout: An animated short poem and tribute to Ingmar Bergman. An acknowledgment for his great work in film.

Verboten • Twin Chefs • Comb

2007-03-01T19:58:00.000-08:00

To view the following three works, click on the image.
• VERBOTEN (2007)
• The Passionate Twin Chefs (2005)
• No Wattle No Comb (2005)

GIZMODO

2007-02-28T13:58:00.000-08:00

02.28.07 | Selected works by Canadian artist Adamo Macri on GIZMODO's Exhibition Gallery.

FRAME

2007-02-27T10:17:00.000-08:00

Absolut Vodka & Lomography Gallery

2007-02-13T12:27:00.000-08:00

02.05.07 | Four different selected works submitted to Absolut Vodka & Lomography to be viewed at the Absolut Lomo Gallery. The featured artwork Avian, caught the attention of Susan Zadeh, Editor In Chief, Artistic Director Founder and Publisher of Eyemazing.
• Dermatome: Cachet (image from an art project entitled Dermatome)
• Still Life: Avian (image from Still Life: Avian Installation)
• Still Life (image from Still Life: Avian Installation)
• Drop Curtain

A Studio Visit by Joseph Gerard

2007-02-13T12:24:00.000-08:00

02.04.07 | A handful of pictures taken by Joseph Gerard on his first visit to Adamo's studio. The photos have been posted via Flickr.com entitled "Adamo Macri Studio Visit" of unpublished images including, sculptural pieces, masks and close ups of mixed artwork.

Newsvine: Multimedia Artist Adamo Macri

2007-02-13T12:23:00.000-08:00

02.03.07 | Newsvine watchlist's article on Adamo Macri by Brandon Bowdry

Gawker Artists

2007-02-13T12:12:00.000-08:00

01.21.07 | He has been recently selected by curator Liz Dummitt of Gumshoe New York to showcase work at Gawker Artists. Gawker Artists is owned by the Gawker Media organization. "The media elite and pop-culture trends of the moment." [New York Times] Gumshoe, LLC 67 East 11th Street, Suite 209 NYC 10003

Spout, Attachable, Alba Parts and Remnant

2007-02-13T11:33:00.001-08:00

Spout: Animated poem and tribute to Ingmar Bergman, an acknowledgment for his great work in film.

Attachable: An attempt at compatibility. The initial action and awkwardness entailed with courtship. The overhead point of view of this empathetic awareness.

Alba Parts: Drawing Alba (short for Albaformisnumeric). Similar to sexual hormones, as they can transform our state of being dramatically, Alba was created to symbolize similar powers. Described by Adamo himself "Created to rationalize the abstract concept of something with the capability to transmute vector symbols such as words or numbers into matter. To sublimate the seemingly demure into a sowing organic breakout."

Remnant: A feeling of disparity ruffled into disconcertion. The lack of acknowledgment compounded with fetishistic pastiche and disruptive behavior. Fragile. Vulnerability exposed into a tempestuous arrest of value. Subjected into the course grain of darkness.

Revver Videos

2007-02-13T10:25:00.000-08:00

YouTube

2007-02-13T10:20:00.000-08:00

01.30.07 | Macri on YouTube managed by ARTrink, featuring ten different video clips that illustrate the development of his conceptualized art projects.

ANTIPASTO ESSAY OUTLINE

2007-02-12T01:52:00.000-08:00

ANTIPASTO: Tribute to Andy Warhol for Little Electric Chair 1964

Antipasto is a large scale art project consisting of numerous photographic pieces as well as performance and sculptural work. This venture is a daring new addition to Adamo’s ongoing exploration of the 3D Event, sculpture as occurrence, anti-sculpture and how it relates to the vanishing object in time, and the resonant image in the mind that remains.

People whom Adamo considers important contributors to the treasury of culture, and who have defined our time have been selected to participate in this project. His list is comprised of a cross-section of artists, actors, writers, pop culture icons, film directors, designers, and musicians. Adamo holds a deep respect for these individuals and a merited esteem for their maverick work. Their involvement consists of answering one simple question, for the purposes of inspiring a piece of art which would depict an image that would represent an aspect of their being and an expansion of the approach to portraiture.
Adamo seeks to suggest and investigate a different aspect or conceptual point of view, extrapolating insight into what an individual's favorite things consist of when placed under the most dreaded of circumstances. Directed by such principles as "we are what we eat” and “we become what we consume", this project explores the reality that what we consume can determine our fate: it can, in essence, be fatal. Every such portrait depicts an aspect, character, allure, or unacquainted discovery about that particular individual.
The assembled replies to this question will be utilized to distill individual interpretational art pieces from this point of view.

If you were an institutionalized prisoner on death row and granted any meal of your choice, what would your last supper be?

Posed in a position of utmost detriment, this question becomes a single moment of levitation in the midst of deep despair.

The concept of motion and evolution examined through Adamo’s art is symbolic of the human condition. Every individual's state of being changes significantly during the course of one single day, due to the evolutionary nature of the human psyche and the constant adaptation to environment and mood. As a result, what one considers palatable in the morning does not necessary appeal in the afternoon or evening. The route traced by these transitions is what Adamo refers to as a "drill".
This is the nature of the question posed to the individuals invited to participate in this project. Adamo has cast the question as what he calls "a duplex drill", juxtaposing the setting of a most horrific predicament with the demand of the individual to think of their favorite things. Duplex drill is one of his conceptualized processes by which he conceives art and content. This method consists of the notion of two simultaneous signals being transmitted from opposing directions causing a parallel or antiparallel surge of one’s mental state, challenging the individual with handling opposite sensations at the same time while ultimately having to discern which is the more suitable at that particular moment. A language thus develops that equates with the human physical being and its experiences in interaction between reality, memory, and our volatile needs.

Adamo’s technique Jahrfish explores contamination as an aggressive method wherein components are broken down to provide raw material for an alchemical process, reassembled within a new composition. Similar to how nothing is wasted in nature and through the process of decay all is reinvented, all elements are broken down in this artistic process to be reassembled in a different fashion. This brings light to a different perspective, as the overall plot or surface may appear dissimilar but the nuances of origin yet lie beneath, locked in as DNA encoding. Thus, a different reality is displayed which hints at its rooted origins.
The advantage of this process allows a wide range of interpretational variables, functioning as a slide rule where the control of style, pitch and texture is left open to affect context. Color, tone, mood, and most important attitude affect a shift in adaptational representation, resulting in a different form of figuration or disfigurement, with cultural references and history serving as raw material for this new contextual language and perspective. This metaphorical deconstruction and reassembly is similar to Cubist or Dadaist art, which presents a normal scene from multiple points of view with objects broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form. Instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context.

By its nature, a project that commemorates Andy Warhol would have to involve or reference the impact of popular culture, the concept of celebrity, and the ramifications of an individual’s presence within a social context or venue. Warhol was one with the people socially, and they featured as subject matter of his infamous numerous portraits. Andy Warhol’s artwork epitomized the prevailing cultural and moral spirit of the time. He reflected and influenced society by being at its center, although he often said that he felt apart from life. It is rare for an artist to become a celebrity, but Andy Warhol experienced much more than his fifteen minutes of fame and became an icon of his generation. In this achievement we see two elements working in conjunction with each other, and the question is raised: Who made whom greater, the artist being ornamented by the celebrity, or the celebrity further popularizing themselves through Andy's visibility? It seems both were needed and worked well together to define a fascinating pop culture in the era of the 60's through the 80's.

Little Electric Chair, one of Warhol's most powerful works, was created in 1964. The Last Supper, the timeless masterwork by Leonardo da Vinci painted in 1495-1498, is yet another icon that resonates within society. The celebrities of pop culture, Little Electric Chair, and The Last Supper share an equilateral common denominator as iconic elements. Each relates strongly to the powerful resonating image as cultural architecture, and illustrates how culture and history are ingrained in popular society. Works such as these become the basis from which we draw identity, as these images serve to construct sculpture within the mind, filling up the ambivalent nature of transparent time.

Creativity and process cannot occur in a vacuum. A mental and physical arena must be determined in which the challenge will take place. This area is termed Chasm. Once this is devised, the motivation is to fill it with the content. Two equally iconic works, Little Electric Chair and The Last Supper, are placed on a vertical axis in this defined space, with empty space between them. Two masses of celebrity portraits are placed on the horizontal axis, also with empty space between them. Two divisions of the space are thereby formed. The two separated cells in a vertical orientation and the two separated cells in a horizontal orientation create a cross chasm. A sculptural spine is thus at the center core of this division, a concrete median that binds the four entities into a governing unit. A trajectory is created between the metaphysical split of a parent cell into two identical daughter cells, resulting in a four-post forum.
Each celebrity participant in this project contributes specific elements that will dictate the limitations as to what can be used to create an art piece, similar to how figurative portraiture is ordered by the individual's facial or body features. Collectively, each meal as described by the participants will function as base nutrients needed to sustain the cell as a single unit, as each platter will have a unique contribution. These nutrients come together to function as a complex unified entity, where the intricate components and details are observed through the magnified lens of the work.

The electric chair has been deliberately chosen as an essential element of this Duplex Drill. Introduced in the United States in 1888, it was considered more a humane method of execution than hanging. The procedure to kill the condemned is as follows: after being tied to the chair, moistened copper electrodes are fixed to the head and a leg, which have been previously shaven to ensure a good adhesion. Death by cardiac arrest and respiratory paralysis are caused by powerful electrical discharges, applied at short intervals. By order of the executioner, an electrician introduces the current for two minutes and eighteen seconds, changing the voltage from 500 to 2000 volts (otherwise the sentenced would burn). The procedure causes ravaging visible effects: the prisoner sometimes jumps forward against the restraints, he urinates, defecates or vomits blood, internal organs are burnt, there is smell of burnt flesh. Though the first discharge of electricity ought to render the sentenced unconscious, this sometimes does not happen; often internal organs keep working, so that further discharges are needed.
This infamous chair possesses great charisma. The simple mention of the term arrests all and gathers complete attention. Irregardless of subjective opinion, it authorizes fervent emotions as though a mystifying royal throne of a monarchy. Its visual presence is just as dense and haunting. It emits an ultra-powered charge within the psyche that affects all emotionally, morally, and spiritually, rendering each to an empty dumbfounded state, as its function is sought out to accomplish. Due to this astonishing quality and function it has inevitably created reverse effects. The power of this symbol has transformed prisoners into celebrities, celebrated those who have sat in it, and has been frequently featured in cinema and mass media. The cult of celebrity causes the criminal and the crimes to resonate in time. Ironically, the chair has also created the anti-celebrity, as by bringing the cult of celebrity to bear upon the sentenced, the innocent victims and their names are lost and forgotten. The media attention paid to the convicted crimes glorifies them as artistry born of originality, creating a horrific magnetism through brutal acts against and upon humanity.

Marvels occur constantly in nature, for the fortunate ones in the right place at the right time present to see and record them. These are typically site-specific occurrences, whereas the visual arts constitute staged occurrences. Like the visual arts, the scene of human culture is not a natural occurrence: it is a staged 3D Event.
Sculpture is an ephemeral three-dimensional occurrence with or without movement, located at a specific point, which conjures up atemporal art. Sculptural pieces are created with or without character performances, similar to a movie set. Adamo then directs how it will be captured on camera. The result is photographic material conceived by the event, as this idea relates to a happening aesthetic in time. What vanishes is the actual temporal sculpted scene. Adamo describes this practice as anti-sculpture.

This staged, specific sculpture becomes an anthropological seed which will be sown for later harvest, making it the future object of study both of its origin, the act of its creation. This is the event object. To refer to the fictions that we enjoy in the privacy of our imagination as "staged" is to remind us of the communal source of these as of all representations. These fictions appear suddenly like a flash mob, expressing a specific need publicly in a very short time period and then dispersing or dissipating quickly. These staged moments function like a human body: the nervous system originates a message, which becomes a mandate for the body to comply with a specific call, or succumb to the consequences.

Who is hosting whom? The artist or the celebrity, the chair or condemned, the media or the crime, the sculpture or the event? These icons split within the crossroads of ANTIPASTO.