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When she gives artist's lectures, sculptor China Adams often describes her work as a race against her own death. Her smooth plaster "chunks" of ensconced trash, her vampiric experiments with blood consumption and her glass Vitrines filled with mummified possessions all attempt to preserve what's bound to decay. But, while her work has the same mortality obsession as Vanitas paintings by the likes of Pieter Claesz or Jacques de Gheyn, Adams steers away from iconic symbols--when skulls appear, it's in the form of a clinical x-ray; when blood appears, it's already been drained, drunk or cleaned up. Instead of representing it, Adams' work acts out against death and this has always struck me as the smartest, most proactive strategy.

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