Adam Belt
Through the Rabbit Hole
April 10 - June 16, 2012
With an early history of landscape painting inspired by the openness of the American west, prodigiously on display in his home state of New Mexico, Adam Belt’s latest efforts expand on that sort of disturbing expansiveness and magnify it into an unprecedented sphere encompassing both the immeasurably large and the infinitesimally small. Those further reaches in these literally out-of-the world vistas render the hugeness of traditional big sky regions puny in comparison, as both the natural world and the mind’s perception of it are engaged by works that allude to reaching back nearly to the big bang on one hand and the tiniest elemental foundations of matter on the other. Making the evanescent perceptible but still mysterious, Through the Rabbit Hole includes two pieces cut into the wall of the darkened gallery, their edge flush with the vertical surface, penetrating and disappearing into the structure of the building itself. In Down the Rabbit Hole, multiple mirrors create a funnel, a tunnel, a vortex of never-ending sequential reflections, but possibly it’s also the depths of a particle accelerator. Both are incomprehensible and sublime, in equal measure, brought inside as models that reflect natural forces coursing through the universe. Through the Looking Glass is likewise a hole to nowhere with a cylindrical rod in the middle jutting out into the visual field, surrounded by concentric circles forever dissolving into a false but very real–seeming, limitless distance. It’s an optical conceptual feast, a conundrum, too, with structures defined by unfathomable emptiness.
Within the field of the image, I also seek to use these properties in my exploration of various ideas of the void, simultaneous states of being and formation/destruction. Creating works that defy both expectation and easy assimilation into the eye-brain’s categorization of what they/it are seeing, these works are openings full of something to look at, confoundedly exploring neither themes of micro or macro. Or, if seen another way, a projection that optically comes out into the space of the air in the room. Either way, these are bewildering and entrancing landscapes of the mind, mixing experiences of physical forms and emotional impressions. Time, entropy, creation, and the unseen forces which shape our physical world are here, visually compelling but also conceptually stimulating, capturing space and substance, light and texture. Deliberate formal structures serve as backdrops to highlight material interaction and change, mixing abstraction and representation, collapsing subject and object into direct experience. Insistently material and meticulously crafted, they bring one to a place where time and space recede and distances measured in billions of light years or fractions of a second are realized through a thought provoking alchemy that that offers wonder in the face of the ineffable.