January 21 - March 2, 2019

“My artwork is essentially a diary of my life, and when I view it in hindsight, I can understand the twists and turns, the narrative of my interests, my jobs, the people I care about.” - Adam Langehough

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Below is a conversation between Adam Langehough and Barbara Owen in preparation for Adam’s show of collages made out of art catalogs. “New Landscapes” will be on view from January 21 – March 2, 2019, at Paper Nautilus in Providence, Rhode Island.

Barbara Owen: You were an art handler at Christie’s Auction house in Manhattan a few years ago. We share this experience as I too was an art handler in New York. It is hard work but exciting as one often gets to see and handle incredible works of art.

The body of work that you will be showing at Paper Nautilus is a series of collages that you made out of Christie’s catalogs. One of my favorites from your series is “Summer Feeling” and incorporates a bit of Donald Judd, a corner of a John Chamberlain, a Juan Usle next to a Roy Lichtenstein and a George Segal. What I Iove about these are that I recognize these bits, even torn and out of context, it’s like an art history guessing game. Also, for this catalog, they must have been auctioning off a collection of Pop Art. As I look at your collages, I can’t help wonder who owned it and of course who bought it. What inspired you to start using them for collage?

Adam Langehough: One of the perks of working at Christie’s was the access to all of those amazing catalogs from all the different sales. It’s just a fact that they need to get really good photos of the work they’re trying to sell and present them in catalog form on high-quality paper for prospective buyers, and those beautiful catalogs are just lying around everywhere in the whole building. They cover all kinds of artwork of every genre you could think of from Contemporary Post-War to Chinese ceramics, to old master drawings, spanning all the different auctions over the last ten years or so, too.

As an art handler for the 20th Century Decorative Arts, we had a pretty small department that would only do 3-4 sales a year, so I could have long periods, weeks to months of downtime in which I would pour over all the different catalogs I had accumulated. I just loved seeing all the different art and discovering lesser-known artists, as well. Near my desk, there was a really nice, high-quality photocopier, and I just started photocopying art from these catalogs, manipulating them by blowing them up and shrinking the photos in size, amassing these stacks of printed images. And then I started cutting them up and piecing them together in collage form because I was just bored at work, but I really started to like the way these images looked, all mashed together and overlapped. I really enjoyed the challenge of piecing them together, almost like a puzzle in reverse, creating new art from all of this old artwork. In some cases, I started to push the use of the photocopier itself as the tool for making the art and I was photocopying inanimate objects, like the hand brush seen in “The Past Shouldn’t Be So Dismissable,” in the top right corner.

BO: I first became aware of your work on Instagram. Since then we’ve become friends but it wasn’t until recently that I came for a studio visit to see the work in person. You showed me two bodies of works one was the collage series and the other a series called “Subliminal Detritus Maps”. These are intricate drawings, using vaguely familiar images from magazines, or the web, a kind of collage but of your own drawing. Can you speak a little about where you are culling the imagery from? Do you see these related at all to the collages?

AL: The “Subliminal Detritus Maps” series that I’m working on is similar to this series of collages in that it’s also a thematically driven collection of images being pieced together, however, the “Subliminal Detritus Maps” are less abstract and more politically and culturally motivated. As you mentioned, the source images are culled from the web and magazines, my own drawings, and all of the imagery is more linked to pop culture and ordinary concepts that are fairly recognizable. The title of the series, “Subliminal Detritus Maps” sort of explains an aspect of the process; while I’m at my day job I let my mind wander around various topics, ideas, and specific images, and I note these down, then, later, I search for images from the lists I’ve made to manipulate in my studio. The pictures need to be collaged or fit together based on shape and size, so in that sense, the process is pretty similar to the work in this show. In the end, each piece is like a map of the mental process of all these various images floating around my subconscious. I should also mention that I see all forms of collage as a challenge of compositional balance, just like any painting, sculpture, or drawing.

BO: Which artists are your greatest influences?

AL: Dieter Roth, Mike Kelley, Lucian Freud, John Chamberlain, Ariel Pink, David Lynch, Phillip Gustin, Yayoi Kusama, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Jenny Holzer, Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Beuys, Richard Tuttle, Jack Whitten. The list goes on and on, really. I feel like I’m the opposite of every artist I’ve ever known, in that I like more art than I dislike. Most artists and musicians I know are incredibly critical and dismissive of other artists.

BO: Now that you work as a security person at the RISD Art Museum do you feel any influences from working daily in a museum?

AL: Every job I’ve had in the art industry, from art handling in galleries, museums, auction houses, to storage/shipping companies has expanded my scope and understanding of art on the whole. Art is more than a visual medium, a business, a means for sociopolitical statements. It’s all of these things, and/or none of these things, depending on who is contextualizing the work. Sometimes that person is a curator in a gallery, and sometimes it’s a super-rich collector. Other times it’s a group of twenty-somethings in a basement in Brooklyn, and sometimes it’s a docent in a museum. My vantage point is educated by all the various forums and contexts I’ve been involved with, so it’s inevitable that working as a security guard in a museum would also contribute to my perspective. I find influence in almost everything I observe if there’s something interesting happening. I often directly adopt imagery, as I’ve done with these collages.

BO: What is your most important artist tool? Is there something you can’t live without in your studio?

AL: That’s tricky because part of what sustains me as an artist is allowing myself to dabble in several mediums simultaneously; currently I’m working on several sculptures made of wood, twine, and plaster, a couple “Subliminal Detritus Maps” — which start off in Adobe Illustrator, get printed and then materialize as oil pastel on paper, — and I’m almost always painting with oil and acrylic. If I had to choose, I think my most important tool would be one of my knives. I use some kind of knife in almost everything I do, and without them, I’d be a little lost. Aside from that, although it may sound cheesy or cliché, the most basic thing as a pencil is often the most valuable tool for an artist.

BO: What does your work aim to say?

AL: Ultimately, the aim of all of my work is to communicate a visual aesthetic. Whether that will take the form of political/social outcry, or abstractly reference the visual language of the art market, I can’t really predict. My artwork is essentially a diary of my life, and when I view it in hindsight, I can understand the twists and turns, the narrative of my interests, my jobs, the people I care about. At times it reflects aspects of my identity, and at other times it’s as undefined as the random thoughts that float in and out of my mind.

Thank you, Adam and thanks for breaking down your collage “Summer Feeling”.