Adam Helms

MCA Denver presented a selection of new works on paper and a large-scale sculpture by Adam Helms, which portrayed radical political groups and extremist subcultures throughout history. Helms draws attention to the continuum between past and present states of violence, occupation, and injustice. Helms uses composite images sourced through the internet and unearthed in library archives to suggest a frontier that is both familiar and distant. His hand is revealed in the work through drawings, thus making personal the interior story of each image.

"I think of myself as an ethnographer. I survey and document the iconography, posturing, and symbols of radical political groups and subcultures, but the ones I depict are fictional. I am interested in the ethos of violence, the romanticization of extremist ideology, and linking issues from our political past with contemporary current events. With conceptual and formal ties to an assemblage of source material—photojournalism of contemporary conflict, war films, political propaganda, nineteenth century American art of the frontier, heraldry—my drawings and sculptures depict a fully-realized yet unfamiliar world populated with empathetic characters and the artifacts of a subcultural pathology. I think of them as constructions, comprised of sources from varying origins. In this way the narrative qualities inherent in my work, are not directed at something specific and illustrative, but are more reflective of a relationship I have to this source material. My work portrays belligerence with a sense of pathos and without a discernable morality. I want the images to be both romantic and subversive; to remain cloaked in such a way that questions are raised within the viewer as to the perspectives on display. Perhaps, in this way throwing into relief the politics we all carry within ourselves, destabilizing the notion of a unified or cohesive identity." - Adam Helms

Adam Helms was born in 1974 and lives and works in Brooklyn. This was the artist's first solo museum exhibition. Helms received an MFA from Yale University, Connecticut and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. He has shown in group exhibitions at Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Kunsthalle und Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; and MoMA P.S.1, New York. Helms was the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.