Installation view: Adam Parker Smith’s Sarcophagi, on view through May 2024

The Hole is pleased to announce the installation of three Adam Parker Smith sculptures at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Chattanooga, Tennessee. Launched in 2021 by The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC) The ICA is the first ICA in the state of Tennessee.

"ICA Chattanooga presents three sculptures in Adam Parker Smith’s (American, b. 1978) Sarcophagi series on the campus grounds of UTC. The works are located across from the University Center on Vine Street.

Standing upright on marble plinths, Smith’s Sarcophagi (2021) are pointedly recognizable in their resemblance to sub-zero sleeping bags. In resin, steel, and urethane, Smith fashions familiar objects, made to appear both inflated and dispensable. His sculptures, in the manner of Readymades, are instantly accessible and quietly satiric, at first glance even seeming to celebrate modern mass production as its own monolithic, deracinated culture. As with Duchamp, the deception of Smith’s unruly objects becomes more apparent the longer one contemplates them.

Made in 2021 in response to tremendous global loss from the Covid-19 pandemic, Smith’s Sarcophagi are symbolic gestures of lamentation at a time when public commemorations of death were and are conspicuously absent. In name, shape, and tonality, they harken back to a time of elaborate burial rites, where embalming and entombing a body in stone could preserve it for millennia. As a pointed contrast, Adam considers the synthetic materials of today’s objects—such as mylar balloons, pool floats, and the polyester down of sleeping bags—which will inevitably outlast any individual experience, and even societal lifetimes, as these objects scatter indiscriminately through landfills across the globe.

Freighted with temporal dimensions, the shapes and tones of Smith’s sculptures also evoke an otherworldly sense of being, appearing as if they might contain alien life-forms or function as gestation pods. Resonating with historic burial rites as well as sci-fi aesthetics, the works ruminate upon the timescales and global pathways along which these synthetic materials move.

Bedecked with “chameleon” automotive paint jobs reminiscent of sunsets, and crafted, like much of his sculptural work, with an eye for replication and the false pretense of flimsiness and ephemerality, Smith’s Sarcophagi stand as liminal, withholding monuments to mourning. By anonymizing the human form, unseen yet implicit within the contours of the work, the artist obfuscates and intimates a crisis of loss, and the loss of our means of honoring the dead."

Sarcophagus (Gold Chameleon), 2021, Resin, catalyzed urethane, steel, fiberglass, marble, 77 x 19 x 18 inches

Sarcophagus (Dark Ice and Magenta), 2021, Resin, catalyzed urethane, steel, fiberglass, marble, 76 x 20 x 14 inches

Sarcophagus (Sunset Fade to Sunrise Fade), 2021, Resin, catalyzed urethane, steel, fiberglass, marble, 77 x 25 x 17 inches

Adam Parker Smith (American, b. 1978) is a Brooklyn based sculptor. He attended Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. His work has been shown widely in the USA as well as internationally in galleries and museums including: the Brooklyn Museum, Marlborough Gallery, London; Derek Eller, New York; The Hole, New York; Ever Gold Projects, San Fransisco; The Donum Estate, Sonoma; Galeria Curro, Guadalajara; Spurs Gallery, Beijing; The Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe, Austria; The Watermill Center, New York and the Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE. Smith’s work has been written about in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Art in America, The Village Voice, ArtForum, Modern Painters, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker and The New York Post.

On view till May 17th at ICA Chattanooga, 752 Vine Street, Chattanooga, TN, 37403 United States (map)

For more information visit the ICA Chattanooga's website