The Buffalo AKG Art Museum is currently showing “Adam Fuss: Visual Resonance,” the artist’s first museum show in more than 10 years. The exhibition will remain on view in the museum’s Hemicycle Gallery through Sept. 29.
Adam Fuss (British, born 1961) works with early photographic processes and camera-less techniques to capture one-of-a-kind images. He is known for taking up nineteenth-century innovations in the medium, such as the photogram, which is made by placing objects on light-sensitive paper, with breathtaking results. In this way, Fuss subverts the primacy of the camera and celebrates the print as an independent object. By their very nature, his images capture an aspect of reality that is otherwise fleeting.
Drawn predominantly from the Buffalo AKG’s collection, with key loans from the artist and a private collection, each of the photographs in this exhibition is a musing on the energy that exists between life and death. Together, they trace the development of Fuss’s My Ghost series, which he began in the early 1990s and continues to the present in his most recent work, titled “Theia.”
Fuss does not seek to manipulate his subjects; instead, he records their pure essence. This allows him to expose the inherent mystery of his images, leaving viewers to imagine a world beyond. The successive effects of a droplet on a pool or the motion of a snake as it slithers through water embody infinite movement and the creative energy only found in nature. Meanwhile, images of thick billowing smoke evoke the transmutational work of an ancient alchemist searching for answers to life’s mysteries, and visions of crushed flowers recall just how fleeting beauty and life can be.
“Adam Fuss: Visual Resonance” is curated by Godin-Spaulding Senior Curator for the Collection Holly E. Hughes.
The exhibition is inspired by and largely drawn from a significant collection of artworks generously gifted to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum by Deborah Ronnen.