Hanging on the walls of the Kresge Art Gallery are drawings that you might find in your own notebook, ones that you absentmindedly doodled during class or chapel. These colorful, obsessive, tiny pieces are the work of J. Bradley Adams, and they are a part of his show titled “garden 321: mensura.” The artist’s own explanation of his work and his process is deeply philosophical. Adams specifically draws on Michel Foucault and his idea of a heterotopia, or a space that has multiple purposes and uses.
Adams’ artist statement begins with a quote from Foucault’s essay “On Other Spaces,” which reads: “The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world.”
Ellie Hitchcock
Adams’ drawings are a representation of the heart of this quote. He made them between 2012 and 2019 during a time when he was not able to be in the studio very often, but still needed an outlet to process the things that he was thinking about. They became like tiny gardens, small heterotopias, where Adams’ ideas were at once contained and yet not willing to be harnessed completely.
For Adams, these drawings were an outlet, but they were also just an enjoyable pastime. “It was a form of play, in a way,” he said in his artist talk. He went on to say that these drawings were a series of experiments in which he tried out patterns with his non-dominant hand or focused on the texture of the paper as it met his pen.
His inspiration came from what he called “a range of armatures,” or a variety of pegs for his ideas to hang on, if only temporarily. They included things like “grids, biological models like cancer growth, the Fibonacci series, or random motions. As such, the drawings engage with the notion of gardens in a more metaphorical sense, and allow for the examination of various manifestations of controlled nature.”
The scale of his pieces is fascinating as well. They draw the viewer toward them, inviting them to interact with the pieces at close range, rather than pushing the viewer away. In this way, Adams is playing with another heterotopic place: museums. The conception surrounding museums is that the viewer is not allowed to interact with the art other than by looking at it.
Adams’ pieces ask the viewer to come closer and see themselves in the small shapes and lines. The tension between the fact that these pieces are hanging in a gallery space, which is usually untouchable, and the fact that they are something the viewer themselves could have done, is actually an invitation, rather than something exclusive. It asks the viewer to come closer and see themselves in the art, to consider themselves an artist, rather than elevating the common until it is out of their reach.