Shane McAdams: Intercourse in Every Direction

 

Please join us on Friday, January 26th from 5-8PM for the opening reception for SHANE McADAMS: INTERCOURSE IN EVERY DIRECTION. This will be the second solo exhibition at The Alice Wilds by artist, writer, curator, and educator Shane McAdams. This exhibition will be on view through Saturday, March 2nd, 2024.

The work in Shane McAdams’ new exhibition INTERCOURSE IN EVERY DIRECTION continues his recent exploration of alternative mark making, material, and imagery that aims to expand the language of painting beyond conventional approaches to landscape painting. His fundamental aims revolve around the relationship between “natural” and “artificial” and how considerations about the genre complicate the tradition of scenic painting. Specifically, the work in this show reflects an attempt to make work with presence, touch, surface, and material ambiguity that forces a prolonged or complicated relationship between the image and the means of production.

The phrase, “intercourse in every direction,” was taken from Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, and speaks to the possibility of how meaning can emerge from a voracious and chaotic agency of interconnected relationships. Marx was referring to a new modern economy, of course, but McAdams has smuggled in the idea to refer to how materials, process, image, and history might interact, merge, and expand to decadently crack open the consolidated pictorial chestnut of the genre. The show could have easily been called “Means of Production,” but “Intercourse in Every Direction” has better legs, and the show aims to run around more than heavy machinery can do in one’s imagination.

Shane McAdams is artist, writer, curator, and educator residing in Cedarburg, WI. His artwork has been exhibited at Allegra LaViola Gallery, Marlborough, Chelsea, Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland, OR, Scream London, and Artistree in Hong Kong, China, The Schneider Museum, The Haggerty Museum of Art, The Kohler Art Center, as well as other venues. His work has been reviewed in Vogue Magazine, The New York Times, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post, and The Village Voice. He has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and Marian University. He is a three-time Creative Capital, Andy Warhol Writer’s Grant finalist, and his writing appeared regularly in the Brooklyn Rail from 2002 to 2012. He has also contributed to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and currently writes for the Shepherd Express for which he received the Visual Arts Achievement in Arts Writing from the Wisconsin Academy of Arts and Letters. His curatorial projects have been reviewed in the New York Times and The Village Voice. In addition to writing, painting, and curating, he is also a partner in REAL TINSEL, an art space on the Southside of Milwaukee.

We hope to see you during this exhibition!