Something Else Is Going On in These Sculpted Shadows

Enter the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Mac Adams” exhibition and discover a whimsical and sometimes foreboding world of mystery and illusion, where photography is likened to sculpture and shadows are completely different from the objects that cast them.

Outside the museum stands “The Fountainhead.” Made of rolled and extruded aluminum pieces, this monumental abstract sculpture resembles both the works of Alexander Calder and some arcane instrument for measuring the courses of heavenly bodies.

However, at about 11 a.m. during the darkest winter months, the sun and Earth align so that “The Fountainhead” casts a shadow of a man in profile expectorating a luxurious stream of liquid. The shadow represents Blaise Manfre, a 17th-Century magician known as the human hydrant because he had two stomachs. Manfre would drink a cup of water, then baffle a crowd by spewing out a stream of wine he had drunk previously.

Speaking by phone from his home in New York, Adams described his sculptures as “armatures” or protective coverings for the essence of what they contain.

“The shadow is the spirit of the work, a spirit that reveals itself under certain conditions and times,” Adams said. “There are certain station points where the sculpture reveals itself.”

Organized by Linda Forsha, a curator at the museum, the exhibition features several of Adams’ abstract sculptures. The metal sculptures, while abstract, generally convey a sense of a scientific instrument. But, when lit by strategically placed spotlights, the sculptures cast unexpected shadows: a fat male sword swallower, a buxom female sword swallower or a man lying on a bed of nails.

“The sculptures are something like cameras,” he said. “They project an image. Shadow is embedded in the image. The overriding issue is that something else is going on.”

Adams’ approach, he said, is to pull the viewers into his creations and make them think about what they’re seeing. Besides the sculptures and their unexpected shadows, the exhibit includes working drawings for Adams’ installations and sculptures, a tableau of what may be a crime scene and a series of photographs.

Adams carefully set up the photographs using shiny chrome appliances--a toaster, a mixer, a coffee maker--so that sometimes eerie scenes are reflected in them.

In a large diptych titled “The Toaster,” one photograph shows a woman’s hand placing a piece of white bread into the toaster. We see in the reflection that she is wearing only underwear. The second photograph shows the woman stretched out on the floor and the toast has popped up, burned to a crisp.

Adams has embedded the idea of a mystery, often accompanied by violence, in these photographs. He traces part of the source for this approach to his youth and growing up in the old Welsh village of Brynmawr.

“We had an enormously verbal kind of culture, with a lot of storytelling,” he said. “I didn’t have TV until I was 14.” He listened to a lot of radio, detective stories like “Dick Barton.”

He studied sculpture at Rutgers University and views his photography as sculpture.

Photographs “seemed the most logical way of dealing with ideas,” he said, “although I thought of them as sculptures.” The sculptural aspect is the painstakingly arranged tableaux, conceived in such a way that the elements--an interrogation or a domestic scene on the verge of a tragedy--are reflected in appliances or gleaming silverware.

In using appliances from the 1940s and ‘50s, Adams said, he is seeking to delve into the origins of post-modernism, an idea whose appropriateness he doesn’t understand. He praised the design of two California landmarks in contrast to AT&T;’s famed “Chippendale” headquarters in New York.

Adams complains that the mixture of exterior Italian and Chippendale designs, which look back in history, do not address the high-technology world of the company inside.

In contrast, he compared the plan of the Salk Institute to a “digital chip,” which fits its mission of research and development. He also praised the Palomar Observatory for its “scientific” design.

“The observatory is an extraordinary attempt to make contact with other worlds,” Adams said.

Design, whether in architecture or contemporary art, has been sidetracked from originality of viewpoint into what sells, he believes.

Adams likes to think of his photographs and sculptures focusing on technology and on today’s problems, and on really looking at them.

“It’s like a computer,” he said of his sculptures. “You can enjoy the design of a computer. They are beautiful objects in themselves. But they require the software to go into them. That’s like a shadow. I would like to see art addressing these kinds of issues of technology rather than the traditional sculptural issues.”