Art Critique: One for the Road

One for the Road is an exhibition organized by Museum London and is currently on view at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. The AGH promises to deliver on a grand scale, and that it does, featuring a whopping total of 64 sculptural, model, and paper works of various sizes. Upon entering the first gallery space housing the exhibit, one is immediately greeted by what is arguably the star of the show—Adams’ “Artists’ Colony” (Gardens) (2012). It is a diorama of sorts, made up of scale model parts and feels immediately familiar to anyone who spent countless childhood hours poring over I Spy puzzle books.

Displayed alone in the room under rectangular glass so as to be viewed in the round, the model contains myriad miniature figures of people interacting with each other and with their surroundings. Assortedly attired figures of men, women, and children frolic and forge their way through a colourful milieu of multiple locales such as a harbour, a boardwalk, and an industrial island of high-rises made from repurposed train cars. But even amidst all of this human development there is nature to be found: forests fringe the outer corners of the diminutive cityscape. The parenthetical gardens implied by the work’s title pop up anywhere from the roof of a building to the top of a barge at sea, often accompanied by a herd of grazing livestock. Whether this work illustrates a human conquering of the natural flora and fauna, or else a re-encroaching of nature into society is difficult to say. The ambiguity creates tension within the work, one that is carried throughout the rest of the exhibition.

Co-curator Melanie Townsend describes Adams’ oeuvre as a “quirky, humorous body of work that illuminates the often-contradictory preoccupations of contemporary society.” Indeed, these contradictions abound in One for the Road, and having to sort through the visual overload causes one to become hyper-aware of its implications. While his models contain a multitude of industrial signifiers such as building cranes and train tracks, Adams’ human figures casually eschew management of them, rather opting to engage in various leisure activities: anything from playing poker to scuba diving. This contrast is also heightens the tension and raises questions about what we as modern society should be doing: advancing through technology or stopping to smell the roses, so to speak? “Artists’ Colony” uncannily validates both viewpoints. Be sure to try and spot the sombre funeral taking place on a hill overlooking a simultaneous monster truck rally, or the campers snapping photographic mementos as their campsite is attacked by grizzlies. This sort of irreverence is characteristic of the humour for which Adams’ work is known, and it is such wit that prevents his art from being pedantic. However, one point of contention I do have with his models are their glaring lack of any figures not of white ethnicity. For an artist so intent on including references to Canadiana in nearly all of his work (even the intangibly Floridian Gift Machine (1988) features a couple of superfluous hockey pucks branded with Canadian Tire logos) one might think Adams would be more astute in his representation and rendering of a society which also reflects Canada: a multicultural country.

Least worthy of mention are Adams’ works on paper; while valuable in the context of prep drawings, their wildness and unrestraint do not hold their own in when compared to the the meticulous precision of his models. And quite honestly, they felt like filler pieces. This is not to say that the exhibition would have been better without them, merely that they become unremarkable in the grand scheme of the gallery. Artists’ Colony is the ultimate reward of attending this exhibition. While I feel that it would perhaps have had a greater impact had it been shown at the end of the exhibition as the culmination of Adams’ process, I can understand the rationale behind employing this piece as the viewer’s initial introduction to Adams’ work. It certainly alerts an audience as to what to expect of the exhibition, and, I would venture to say, even acts as an advisory of the level of viewer engagement necessary to get the most out of it.

Finally, I would like to address the compelling aspect of the exhibition’s title. The phrase ‘one for the road’ suggests an impending journey of movement or travel, yet the exhibition itself is undeniably static. One of “Artists’ Colony’s” central features is a square stack of multiple train cars filled with commuters who are quite literally off the rails; divorced from a track there is nowhere for them to go. “Toaster Work Wagon” (1997) consists of multiple paired bicycles which appear fused together at a common back wheel, rendering them fascinatingly symmetrical but essentially unrideable. Even the one mechanized aspect of the collection, the model trains which wind through the enormous cavern of the industro-futuristic sculpture “Travels Through the Belly of the Whale” (2013), is stuck in an endless loop, always coming back to where it started. The tension born of these fixed, stationary pieces starts to become palpable in the gallery, and contradicts the exhibition’s multiple ideas of and references to roads, travel, vehicles, mobility, and transience. With this in mind, perhaps One for the Road is not a road we are meant to travel down at all. Maybe it is not meant to take us to a logical conclusion, but rather do for our minds what gasoline does for a automobile. One for the Road is an experience we are meant to take home in thought, operating our own intellectual vehicles and paving our own roads out of what we learned from Adams’ devised contradictions and social commentary.