Adam Laerkesen

03 January - 06 February     Drunk on the Moon

 Link to artist's website

Adam Laerkesen’s arresting installation reads like a still life. It is set out in a clear theatrical manner that seems to me, allegorical. And Adam agrees, inviting the obvious question – so what’s the allegory?  To which he replies, “I like to leave that a bit open-ended.”

“There’s a drunken figure on the left,” he explains - I can see it sprawled across a lectern, drunk on prayer and wine,  “and a female voice, among the woods under a full moon” he continues. And yes there is a malevolence lurking for me in the form of a classically draped ironing board she-wolf, tensed and ready to pounce. Ridden by a cloven-footed tree ladder I wonder?  “No” advises Adam, “it’s just a hoof that I carved at the end of a piece of wood as a conclusion”. 

After a while our conversation turned to the mythological figures Bob Dylan refers to in his songs. Which left me wondering, when later that night I found myself listening to “Isis” on Dylan’s, Desire album.

“I married Isis on the fifth day of May – but could not hold on to her very long – so I cut off my hair and rode straight away – for the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong…Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child – what drives me to you is what drives me insane – I still can remember the way that you smiled - on the fifth day of May in the drizzling rain.”

Google the song’s meaning and you will read – “Isis is a mystery, and the story makes no real sense – it is just a set of irrational images without the sequence that we so crave. And that’s why it works. It tempts you to think there is a meaningful sequence, but as you try to grab it, it walks away.”

Or as a friend of mine pointed out recently, the trick to meaning-fullness is in the gaps you leave between things for the viewer’s mind to fill in later. It keeps the work alive and assures its relevance to an audience. As a method it took Dylan from speed freak rock star to Nobel Laureate and it seems to work for Adam Laerkesen as well. 

Tony Twigg

Adam Laerkesen

link to artist's website

11 March - 7 April       My Song is not Your Song

 

Adam Laerkesen. My Song is not Your Song. 2017. Wood bull head, anchor rope, painting on wood.

Adam is a northern European, born in New Zealand who arrived in Sydney, as a 15 year old via the Gold Coast, but that probably isn’t why his song is not your song.

Drawing, 9 hours a week of it was the basic training he received while studying sculpture at the National Art School. According to Adam it’s “a method of honing the eye”.  After a stint at the Sydney College of Art it was still there when his education gave way to the need for making. And it’s here. This is a drawing.

Adam Laerkesen. My Song is not Your Song. 2017.

Hearing Adam talk about his work is like listening to a detailed discussion about the function of drawing: “always about taking inanimate forms and animating them”; “try not to make it about the self, to make it about the other”; “keep it open ended”; “suspend logic as a way of holding the viewer to the work”.

We must look and look again at this precariously attractive image that is drawn from intuition.  There is no plan here. History is little more than a license to practice assemblage. Intuition for Adam is filtered through daydreams. He describes states of mind at the edge of sleep, when in tiredness dreams flash across our eyes and the space between waking and the assertion of consciousness. “It mirrors the narrative of found objects, which have lost their function and are in the process of finding a new one.”

A key to the work is the yellow painting in the top left had corner.  Visually it’s a crucial element that Adam says was painted by his son, playfully in his studio somewhere in the past. For Adam, it offers fatherhood as a premise for the work, “the camel trying to pass through the needle's eye” as Adam comments in a fractured metaphor that draws the melancholy on a quest for innocence.

Tony Twigg