revision final preview
Adam Lenz
Adam Lenz An artist's statement
A native of Kalamazoo, Michigan, Adam Lenz is an American composer and media artist currently pursuing a MM in Composition from the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut. Here he studies composition with Ken Steen and serves as the Graduate Fellow in
Electronic Music Composition. Adam also holds a BM in Music Composition (2012) and a MA in Music Research (2013) from Western Michigan University. Adam’s work explores the intersections of concert music, installation art, performance art, and visual mediums. His works have been presented at international venues including the Watermill Center (New York), the International Streaming Festival for Audio
A still from Sloth (2012)
Visual Art (The Hague/online), the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Germany), the Toride Railway Station (Japan), the Conser– vatorio de Música de Chihuahua (Mexico), and the Badisches Staatstheater (Germany). In 2013, Adam was a participant in the Watermill International Summer Program. Here he worked with avant-garde theater director and designer Robert Wilson. This led to a collaboration with
Wilson and UK composer Dom Bouffard on Wilson’s first radio drama ‘Monsters of Grace II.’ Currently, Adam is collaborating with Wilson on a production of Eugene Ionesco’s ‘Rhinoceros’ at the Teatrul National “Marin Sorescu” in Craiova, Romania.
An interview with
Adam Lenz Sloth is part of Wheel of Sins, a project spearheaded by the Abderrahman Anzaldua, Mexican violinist. Could you introduce our readers to this project? In the summer of 2011, I spent the month of June traveling in southern Mexico with my friend Abderrahman. While we were there, he began talking with me about a project that would bring together composers/multimedia artists around the idea of sin. To date, the project has included Christopher Biggs (USA), Valeria Jonard (Mexico), and Ivan Naranjo (Mexico), in addition to my work. Each of us have created works for Abderrahman that incorporate some sort of visual element and electronics alongside the solo violin. Three more works will be created to finish out the cycle. Synesthesia is a fundamental aspect of your art practise: you have formal training in sound, and no doubt the starting point of your research is not music itself, but musical thinking, which is at the same time philosophical and gestural. Could you explain this aspect of your art? My formal training is in music, but I have also completed coursework in film music history, ceramics, glassblowing, sculpture, and painting outside of the university curriculum. I have also worked in theater and have been an amateur photographer since I was a child. I think I draw upon all of these mediums. I get a little bored otherwise. For me, I can draw upon visual form, color, texture, gesture, and even conceptual idea to approach the materials I choose to work with sonically. In the same way though, a sound or collection of sounds might give way to a style of motion or a series of images. Although we like to separate art forms into different departments, you can’t deny the direct connection that all of the arts have. I think it is important that a work like this is developed in a manner that all of the fields of art that are employed are conceived together. You get a
Adam Lenz
Adam shot all of the footage for Sloth while he was living in Kalamazoo. Michigan. The fan, candle, and window scenes were shot in his apartment and the landscape images were filmed at the Asylum Lake Preserve and along the railroad tracks by the Kalamazoo River near his hometown.
more powerful effect with this sort of holistic approach. When I write an essay, I approach it in the same way that I write music. And, similarly, I approach film, assemblage art, and even photography in a very similar manner. It’s adding, subtracting, shifting, reorienting, and even repurposing until everything feels right. We find that your art is rich of references: for example, the shot connecting between the fan and the panorama reminds us of the beninning shots of L'Eclisse by Michelangelo Antonioni. Can you tell us your biggest influences in art and how they have affected your work? Objects carry a great deal of meaning for us. They often tie us to place or time, and can even bring us back to very specific memories. In my work, I largely leave the spaces devoid of humans. The objects themselves are left to paint a scenario for us. While each object referenced in a scene carries a very specific meaning for me, the audience is invited to recall their own connections to these objects and explore the memories that they associate with them. I grew up looking through my father’s books on Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Bob Rauschenberg. I am
A still from Sloth (2012)
Sloth is part of Wheel of Sins, a project spearheaded by the Abderrahman Anzaldua, Mexican violinist. Could you introduce our readers to this project? In the summer of 2011, I spent the month of June traveling in southern Mexico with my friend Abderrahman. While we were there, he began talking with me about a project that would bring together composers/multimedia artists around the idea of sin. To date, the project has included Christopher Biggs (USA), Valeria Jonard (Mexico), and Ivan Naranjo (Mexico), in addition to my work. Each of us have created works for Abderrahman that incorporate some sort of visual element and electronics alongside the solo violin. Three more works will be created to finish out the cycle. Synesthesia is a fundamental aspect of your art practise: you have formal training in sound, and no doubt the starting point of your research is not music itself, but musical thinking, which is at the same time philosophical and gestural. Could you explain this aspect of your art?
My formal training is in music, but I have also completed coursework in film music history, ceramics, glassblowing, sculpture, and painting outside of the university curriculum. I have also worked in theater and have been an amateur photographer since I was a child. I think I draw upon all of these mediums. I get a little bored otherwise. For me, I can draw upon visual form, color, texture, gesture, and even conceptual idea to approach the materials I choose to work with sonically. In the same way though, a sound or collection of sounds might give way to a style of motion or a series of images. Although we like to separate art forms into different departments, you can’t deny the direct connection that all of the arts have. I think it is important that a work like this is developed in a manner that all of the fields of art that are employed are conceived together. You get a more powerful effect with this sort of holistic approach. When I write an essay, I approach it in the same way that I write music. And, similarly, I approach film, assemblage art, and even photography in a very similar manner. It’s adding, subtracting, shifting, reorienting, and even repurposing until everything feels right. We find that your art is rich of references:
A still from Sloth (2012)
A still from Sloth (2012)
suggest a state of realism. Paul Schrader really capitalizes on this in his film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985). Here he is using hypersaturated colors, muted colors, and black and white to help provide structure, emotion, concepts of time, and even ideas about reality and fantasy. It's really remarkable how much information we get just from the color. In some cases though, I think color gives us too much information. Black and White are the total absence of light and the equal combination of all colors of light in the visible spectrum: the juxtaposition of
complete nothingness and totality. There’s something really rich about this. In black and white film there is also a complete absence of reality and yet also an absolution of reality. Without color, we are immediately stripped of a connection to what we live in our everyday lives. But, we are still seeing everything. What changes is the way in which we are forced to interact with what’s in front of us. We don’t have color to feed us an emotion or to provide us with the extra details about an image. We are forced to look at what’s in front of us and see it for what it is. I guess it’s stripping away a layer of emotion and detail so that we can find
source for your works. Where do you get the ideas for your work? Ever since I was very young, I have remembered situations in great detail. These moments get replayed in my head over and over again and I have a very difficult time erasing them. Making art has become a way for me to come to terms with memory and to put it to good use. As I work, I am able to take images that have a very powerful meaning to me and isolate them. Then I am able to simplify them down to the important parts. When these images are taken out of the context of the greater narrative, their meaning becomes more fluid. Some people might see this as problematic, but I really like it. A silver vase on a nightstand, for instance, is going to mean something quite different to each person that looks at it. But that meaning is going to be very personal for them. And maybe that’s better than if I just tell them what it makes me feel like. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts with us, Adam. What's next for Adam Lenz? Are there any projects on the horizon? Thank you for your interest in my work and for inviting to present it here.
our own relationships with the objects and connect to our own stories. There isn’t color to make the images real for us, so we have to dig deeper to make it real. For this piece, it was really important that I turn to black and white. Sloth is a portrait, but there are no people. The portrait is internal. I have selected images that come from my past to shape the portrait, but it should also be a portrait of the viewer. And to achieve this I needed them to dig a little harder and just focus on the essentials. Defining your artistic vision, we daresay that your personal experience is your main
I am currently finishing a new video installation titled Shifts. Like Sloth, I’m interested in exploring ideas of memory and identity. In Shifts though, I’m also interested in how our perspectives change on these memories as we looking at them over time. This time I’m trying out the polar opposite approach and employing completely unnatural colors and often unidentifiable images. I want to invite the viewer to get lost in a dream and give them a chance to latch onto the glimmers of reality that they can identify and relate to. Over the last year I been working in the theatre with the avant-garde American director Robert Wilson. Bob places a really strong emphasis on the idea of structure. He even establishes a structure before any content is decided. I’m working in a very similar way with Shifts. There is no linear narrative and no real starting and ending point. The piece is like a collection of fragmented memories that are held together by a classical structure that keeps spiraling back into itself. It should be completed sometime this fall.