It’s (very) early in the morning, and I’m sitting in a train station.
I forget how loud these places always are. But it’s another spot where I think about architecture and the structural as facets of life with embedded possibilities for a strange, even esoteric wash of connection. Why can I feel at home in a place so massive and beyond me, physically?
I’m thinking back to artworks in an exciting exhibition in New York City at Zürcher Gallery featuring Alice Adams, a longtime artist whose creations in this show include sculptures and works on paper.
The sculptures do not immediately, directly remind me of anything I remember seeing before, in a fine arts context. They’re (largely) wooden constructions, the large ones placing wooden slats around rising, inner columns. It hearkens to enclosure while removing that actual function, as the backs… or at least, what I clocked as the backs… tended to be left open, meaning without more of those slats.
The artworks paralleled architecture and brought joy to it. The wooden sculptures in particular utilized materials so associated with the long-lasting and grounded, and their forms brought the same qualities to the front, but they each spiraled upwards from the earth in simultaneity.
They pointed to something special, I think, about the human experience of our bodies and physical environments. These tangible contours link us so directly with the earth while our spiritual, or at least internal, world suggests an elsewhere. These two parts exist together.
The overall, aesthetic impression from Adams’ artworks, though distinctly not bodily, still left the space for it. In their surprising subtlety and gentility even while moving intensely, a quality highlighted by a few similarly angular sculptures in the show that are actually quite small, you are left with a place for a story, your story, while interacting with these icons of the architectural.
I’m walking down the street now, glancing in the big windows of closed restaurants, and a similarity occurs to me.
You know when you’re sitting in a restaurant booth, maybe alone or maybe with someone you care about, or maybe even with someone entirely new to you, and you feel the gently pressing, physical presence of this perhaps unfamiliar, external, rigid, but… welcoming environment, and everything just feels… right? The bodily and non-bodily, together.
Among Adams’ artworks and in their correlate, real-world environments, you are left distinctly separate from — but mirrored by — what you’re looking at, and you feel… grounded. You know it’s temporary and created, that the experience will end, and maybe even the whole place will. Restaurants don’t last forever! Somewhere once cherished may eventually be closed when you look it up again. The potential for it to become just a memory is embedded in the initial experience, I think.
But anyway, even in the face of that, you feel welcome, and you can relax for a moment.
Throughout our lives, we move — in terms of where we live — to perhaps many different places, some more far flung than others. Amidst this, we remember the physical impression of a place, its textures and the way it made us feel… physically, emotions becoming, or remaining, tangible.
Maybe the theme park made you feel small, if you visited when you were a child while everything was so new. A place transforms in front of us to the feeling of itself, which we then carry with us into wherever we go next. Home is a feeling we take along, and it’s one that takes us along in unison. And I think all of that shines through in Adams’ artworks.
You just want to look, and you feel the space for that in these pieces. It’s exciting to see what is so distinctly outside of us made into something still… elevated that brings along its viewers. The kind of awesome magnitude I think we’re used to noticing in something like the architectural marvels of a Renaissance church can be found, well, anywhere! It’s even in forms far more familiar.
Alice Adams: “Sculpture and Drawings 1964-2025” continues at Zürcher Gallery, New York through July 22. Thank you to the gallery, and best wishes to the artist!
