Portrait #9 2022

Editor: This is Adam Caldwell's "Portrait #9" from 2022. It seems to be a mixed-media piece, maybe oil and collage? There’s a dreamlike, unsettling quality to the combination of textures and images. How do you interpret this work? Curator: Looking at the materials and their assembly reveals quite a bit. The collage elements disrupt the painted portrait, fracturing the image. Notice how Caldwell layers commercially printed imagery with more traditional painting. This challenges the preciousness often associated with oil painting, right? It speaks to the commodification of images, their mass production and consumption. Editor: So, the collage elements are intentionally undermining the portrait’s traditional status? Curator: Precisely. And consider the "rain of fabric" label and arrow, almost scientific in their detachment, juxtaposed with the implied emotion. This creates a tension, a friction between observation and feeling, that reveals how the language and the materials both mediate and distort the subject. The inclusion of other images within images, like that sketch at the bottom or the distant people, encourages one to see them for the sum of its cheap materials as well. What kind of labour created each of those bits and bobs? How is it that they came to exist in relation to one another? Editor: That makes me think about how our identities are also constructed from these fragments of media and experience. The materials really tell a story about how we’re shaped. Curator: Exactly! The artwork encourages a kind of 'reading' not just of the subject's face, but also of the entire social context embedded within its making. And by looking at the materials and manufacturing practices alone, there is a good deal that this tells. Editor: I never considered the materials in that much detail before, seeing them almost as secondary. Now I see how much meaning they can carry and the narrative each one is giving life to. Curator: I think taking the making into account really informs everything about this painting, and offers you an insight into the artist.