East West Buddha
Mac Adams
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East West Buddha by Mac Adams was donated by the artist in 2023. This work uses light and time as part of the composition of its medium, and the two elements are as integral to the sculpture as the physical components of stone and metal. Through the positioning of the stones on metal platforms, the sculpture is designed to respond to the earth’s tilt and shift. The steel anamorphic forms respond to the sunlight revealing the shadow of a person in meditation. This time-based work becomes activated through the months of May, June, July, and part of August around 11am and 2pm every day. East West Buddha opens up thought-provoking ways of thinking about time as a component of art making. Time is something we tend to think about as degenerative when it comes to art- aging, weathering, breaking down form- but in this sculpture, time is generative, providing a glimpse at meaning that is both fleeting and dormant, always there, just waiting for the right moment to reveal itself. Like the garden that surrounds it, this work follows a cycle of seasonal change and renewal.
“I am inspired by the Buddhist philosophy of the interconnectedness of things. I have discovered that the arrangement of tangible objects, when exposed to a specific directional light source, can reveal other kinds of information. These shadows, when projected, create a disjunction between the traditional concept of form and content as a unified ideal, and begin to suggest other parallel phenomena existing as an illusion. The space between these two very separate realities is what continues to interest me in my work."-Mac Adams
Mac Adams (American, b. 1943, Wales, UK) is based in Montclair, NJ, and has been a Professor for Visual Arts at SUNY, Old Westbury since 1988. Adams is a versatile artist in a range of media, including sculpture, mosaic, and photography. His work can be found in many museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Centre Pompidou, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 1969, while still a graduate student at Rutgers University, he participated in the first ‘Soft Art’ exhibition at The New Jersey State Museum, along with Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, and John Chamberlain among other influential artists. In the 1970s, Adams was part of a group of artists who began using photography to experiment with constructed narratives and social documentation, and he became known for his Mystery series of Noir-inspired black and white photographs and tableaux installations, which asked viewers to use visual clues to reconstruct the story.
In the 1980s Adams began working with light and time as elements in his sculptures. Figurative shadows were projected from structures that were highly abstract, only revealing themselves under certain light conditions. Large outdoor shadow sculptures revealed hidden iconography via the path of sunlight responding to the earth’s tilt and shift. Adams looks at these works like performative space and enjoys the ambiguity of the arrangement of forms when they lie “dormant” outside the peak viewing time, noting that off-peak, the sculptures “read like Rorschach ink blots, revealing more about the viewer in their musings for meaning.” That the “meaning” is there but not recognizable is a parallel that Adams likes to highlight in this body of work, “The question immediately emerges, is meaning a temporary condition controlled only by recognition of socially ingrained archetypes?”
