Adam Hurwitz is an artist living and working in New York City. He received his M.F.A. in painting from Yale University and has exhibited in solo and group shows in New York City, Boston, San Diego, and elsewhere. Grants include the Joan Mitchell Foundation and a 2014 NYFA grant in Digital/Electronic Arts. He is a recipient of MacDowell Colony Fellowships in 2015 and 2017, and Yaddo residencies in 2016, 2018 & 2019. He is currently a recipient of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts studio residency. His work has been reviewed in The New Yorker and he was the featured artist in the Fall/Winter 2015 issue of the Tupelo Quarterly. Recent solo exhibitions include extraOrdinary, at STUDIO10 Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Pause/Play at Lithium Gallery in Chicago, both 2018, and “Time’s Marrow” at the South Bend Museum of Art, 2019. Recent group shows include Currents New Media Festival in Santa Fe, NM, 2017 as well as the traveling exhibition, “Real-Fake” in 2017/2018

QUESTION:

In most of the work I have seen up until the present your animations render places without people. The traces of people, their leftovers, their environment are drawn but never people themselves. There is a person, of course, just outside the frame, the subject looking at the scene, as if in first person POV. In May, for instance, the viewer is positioned as if laying in bed staring at the ceiling. The unseen protagonist might be imagined as a teen, a dreamer, a proto-artist, paying attention to subtle changes of the light seeping from the outside to the inside. Nothing happens but awareness. May is closer to the stillness of Robert Ryman’s paintings than to most time-based mediums, which rely on the dynamic crescendo and resolution of storytelling. I sense a change in the most recent work, in Satellite 1 and especially in Corkscrew. Corkscrew still contains an invisible human protagonist but the dancing corkscrew becomes a character, moving, spinning, pausing, a dynamic figure in in a created setting, not just the setting itself. Do you think you are moving away from pieces where “nothing happens”? Does it feel like a change to you? What is the source of your interest in creating a foregrounded figure involved in a more traditional narrative structure? Do you think the day to day sameness of the isolation brought on by Covid-19 will affect your new found attention to the figure, as opposed to the ground?

ANSWER:

It is true that for most of my work, the subject is the viewer and the videos are experienced from a first person perspective—a subjective POV. I think of Corkscrew as anomalous as its the closest to traditional or 3D animation that I have come. I was still hoping to convey a sense of the play and invention that comes out of boredom and isolation which is why there is no musical accompaniment to the dancing and skating corkscrew. The only sound is the mechanical clinking of the corkscrew itself, along with the wind and birds heard outside as the late afternoon sun charts a path across the kitchen table. I was trying to place the viewer as a child amusing itself while time passed slowly on a summer day. The way the corkscrew just collapses with an abject clunk as it returns to its inanimate existence, after its flights of fancy, is intended to reinforce that sense of ennui. It’s also just a silly video with a dancing corkscrew. It was fun to rig the corkscrew and bring it to life. That particular corkscrew—as well as the salt cellar re-purposed from an old mustard jar and standing in as a silent observer—are touchstones from my youth. As fun as it was, I don’t have immediate plans to make more pieces with a foreground figure and narrative structure as you say. Part of the attraction for me to work with computer animation is to subvert the medium itself and to find moments of visual poetry that aren’t associated with Pixar-like 3D animation or action-movie visual effects. Corkscrew was started before the pandemic but the themes of isolation, boredom and play, which are found in much of my work, do seem to gain a particular relevance as we try to live through this time of Covid-19.

Corkscrew (excerpt), 2020 from Adam Hurwitz Studio.

In some ways my videos are an extension of my painting practice. They occupy a space somewhere between painting and video. Because they are non narrative and often looping, a viewer can enter at any time and spend as much time with the piece as he or she likes. The static perspective invites the kind of scrutiny that is more associated with painting than video or film. In that way I’m hoping they sustain a longer connection to the viewer than a video that has a discrete narrative arc or a beginning and an end. There are exceptions where some of my pieces have a POV that moves through the scene—exploring the underbelly of a grand piano or circling a trio of radio towers along a highway, for instance—but I’m hoping the looping contemplative nature of the motion has a similar effect: to place the viewer in a time and place that also seems untethered from time and place.

May (excerpt), 2015 from Adam Hurwitz Studio.

I really want to place the viewer in the scene, to experience the texture of a world both specific and universal and open to their own associations and interpretations. The reason why there is only the suggestion of other people in the scenes (the muffled sounds of a dinner party through a closed door, the sun-tanned arm in the window of semi tractor trailer) is that if a figure is introduced they become the focus of the scene, a distraction pulling you outside of the experience. The less detail you offer about the point of view the more immersive the experience becomes for the viewer.

Hide (excerpt), 2017 from Adam Hurwitz Studio.