The Fence Thief, 2007 C-print, 37.5 x 50 inches, 95.25 x 127cm Adam Frelin Winners, Factions & Thieves I thought long and hard for us all - my only swerving ... William Stafford, "Traveling Through the Dark", 1962 Their's not to make reply, Their's not to reason why, Their's but to do and die ... Lord Alfred Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade", 1870 In his first solo exhibition at Samson Projects, Adam Frelin presents three new projects, "Winning Men", "The Faction" and "The Fence Thief", shown in video and photographs. Additionally, an object from an upcoming project, "Lighthouse Beheaded". With unwavering diligence, the characters in these narrative projects are drawn toward a particular activity like modern day explorers. In "Winning Men", a boy repeatedly rides his dirt bike to a nearby county fair where he wins images of famous men that he uses to cover his bedroom walls. With "The Faction", members of Ukraine's military band secede from their larger group to perform throughout the margins of the capital city of Kiev. And in "The Fence Thief", an arborist steals a painted fence from someone's yard and backpacks the wood into the forest, where he uses it to create a color-coded ladder up the side of a tree. "In many ways my projects are extracted moments taken from a larger story that is never told in its entirety," Frelin states. "They are moments that describe certain actions (moving, floating, stealing, escaping, disappearing) that are motivated by self-imposed or external forces. The result of both leading and being lead, characters carry out their actions with a strong sense of mission. In my work these activities take place - physically and thematically - at points where the natural world and our constructed world intersect." Even as he goes to great lengths to create and catalogue revelatory intercessions in the environment, Frelin realizes the hubris and the ultimate impossibility of bending the world to his will and his will to the world ... but he also shows us that the marks left in the struggle for control can serve as portentous blazes on the trail. (Toby Kamps, Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX) Adam Frelin (Grove City, Pennsylvania, 1973) received his MFA from the University of California, San Diego. His work has shown at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Research Institute, LA, CA, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO. Recently he completed "White Line", a commissioned outdoor project in Tokyo, Japan and his first book of photography, "Trees Hit By Cars". Frelin is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at SUNY University at Albany, NY where he lives and works. Exhibition: March 21 - May 3, 2008 Gallery hours: Wed-Sat 11 am - 5 pm, and by appointment Samson Projects 450 Harrison Avenue Storefront 63 USA-Boston, MA 02118 Telephone +1 617 357 7177 Fax +1 617 357 5559 Email samson@samsonprojects.com www.samsonprojects.com |
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