The Hole is pleased to present Standing on the Moon, a solo exhibition of new sculpture by Adam Parker Smith. The show represents the full debut of Smith’s iconoclastic Sarcophagi series, which add a new existentialism to the artist’s longstanding practice of recasting classic sculptural forms with “faux” materials.

Standing upright on marble plinths, Smith’s Sarcophagi are pointedly recognizable in their resemblance to sub-zero sleeping bags. In resin, steel, and urethane, Smith fashions familiar objects, made to appear both inflated and dispensable. His sculptures, in the manner of Readymades, are instantly accessible and quietly satiric, at first glance even seeming to celebrate modern mass production as its own monolithic, deracinated culture. As with Duchamp, the deception of Smith’s unruly objects becomes more apparent the longer one contemplates them.

Crafted over the past year in response to tremendous global loss, Smith’s Sarcophagi are symbolic gestures of lamentation at a time when public commemorations of death are conspicuously absent. In name, shape, and tonality, they harken back to a time of elaborate burial rites, where embalming and entombing a body in stone could preserve it for millennia. As a pointed contrast, Adam considers the synthetic materials of today’s objects—such as mylar balloons, pool floats, and the polyester down of sleeping bags—which will inevitably outlast any individual experience, and even societal lifetimes, as these objects scatter indiscriminately through landfills across the globe.

Freighted with temporal dimensions, the shapes and tones of Smith’s sculptures also evoke an otherworldly sense of being, appearing as if they might contain alien life-forms or function as gestation pods. Resonating with historic burial rites as well as sci-fi aesthetics, the works ruminate upon the timescales and global pathways along which these synthetic materials move.

Bedecked with “chameleon” automotive paint jobs reminiscent of sunsets, and crafted, like much of his sculptural work, with an eye for replication and the false pretense of flimsiness and ephemerality, Smith’s Sarcophagi stand as liminal, withholding monuments to mourning. By anonymizing the human form, unseen yet implicit within the contours of the work, the artist obfuscates and intimates a crisis of loss, and the loss of our means of honoring the dead.

Standing on the Moon

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