Collection: Adams Puryear - Featured Artist

Artist Statement:

Experimentation, deep inquiry, humor and interdisciplinary assemblage drive my practice. I use a punk DIY ethos involving appropriation, materiality and suspicion of existing popular frameworks to create a speculative response to our technological and economic immersion. This is accomplished by merging craft traditions with physical elements and unexpected modes of sculpture and installation. By approaching 3D, craft and time-based art from experimental perspectives and using a variety of materials and techniques, I present an elemental vision of our possible future.Core strategies are borrowed from the punk music I grew up with. Punk in my broad definition includes the familiar music, an individualist attitude that questions standards and authority, a Do-It-Yourself(DIY) attitude, as well as a preference for choosing friendship over money. In music, technical aspects of bands like the Ramones or Stooges are minimal and straightforward: a few simple guitar chords and unadorned driving drum patterns. But what is evoked with the feeling and attitude of a song like the Stooges’ I wanna be your Dog, gives the music its lasting effect. From a certain perspective, can anyone really do better than Iggy Pop, walking on people’s hands, smearing peanut butter and glitter on himself during a performance in front of thousands of people? Within my artwork I try to reflect this attitude, style and ethos of Iggy and the other punks by reducing my work to the fundamentals which allows the urgency to appear.

Bio:

Adams Puryear’s (b. 1981) work merges craft traditions with unexpected modes of sculpture and installation. By approaching 3D art from different perspectives and using a variety of materials and techniques, he presents visions of today and tomorrows’ Internet dependent culture of convenience. Adams Puryear holds an MFA from Indiana University and a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art. Puryear's work has been featured in and around New York City in solo and group exhibitions, nationally in galleries and museums such as the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, MO and the Kennedy Museum in Athens, OH, and internationally at galleries such as Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich, GR, and museums like Icheon World Ceramic Center in South Korea. He currently lives and works in Kansas City, MO.

Find Adams’s Artaxis page: https://artaxis.org/artist/adams-puryear/

Find Adams on Instagram: @adamspuryear

** Adams Puryear's Artaxis Shop has ended. You can find more work available for sale by visiting the other Featured Artist collections HERE