Models and Toaster Wagon Works

Kim Adams

July 2005

Kim Adams, a major artist both nationally and internationally, will exhibit large- and small-scale sculptures that simultaneously clarify and mystify the machinations of contemporary culture. One cannot regard Adams’ work without initially considering his choice of working material and the familiarity of his sculptural forms: he appropriates pre-existing structures and objects which are chopped and transformed into a hybrid of non-utilitarian function. His palette in the large scale works comprises the recognizable forms of automobile body parts, prefabricated industrial and farm storage units and the immediately recognizable domestic ware of ironing boards and garden sheds found at the local Canadian Tire store.

His assembling technique consciously challenges our inherent ordering of the objects’ worth or hierarchy, presenting a visual and psychological conundrum to challenge accepted aesthetics. His vision lies in this ability to transform the raw material of the banal with such facile and disturbing ease.

The ‘models,’ small-scale sculptures fabricated from plastic kits from the world of model train sets, are built to the universal 00 scale, which is 1/87th life-size. Adams explains that these projects can be realized as full scale objects because the world of kit models only mimics the existing world. We experience to the anonymous domain of commercial and industrial objects, truck containers, storage tanks, pipes and gantries – the familiar forms that shape the industrial setting which, like with his larger sculptures, are chopped and reconstructed as semi-functioning anomalies.

A figure is invariably present to bear witness to his persistence of scale. These figures watch and seem to imply a contemporary tableau where action is frozen and meaning or allegory implied. This form stimulates an acute perception of his cynical and whimsical humour and his ongoing anthropological study on the transient nature of a fugitive society.

- Tony Massett