2025
2022-2024
WINDOWS SCAFFOLDS AND VISIONS OF EXCESS 2025
THE SUNSHINE OF PARADISE ALLEY 2024
ABOUT
CONTACT
CV
WINDOWS SCAFFOLDS AND VISIONS OF EXCESS reimagines the architectonics of communication and isolation as a set of provisional pedagogical instruments: pared down, half-finished (half-ruined) structures that stage a precarious alliance between body and object, presence and absence, form and anarchy. As a constellation, these pieces meditate on the spatial choreography of an erotic underworld, spectacle as a site of alienation, and the inarticulate, abject compulsions hidden behind the arras of formal thought.
The plywood constructions are abstract but familiar. They echo furniture (both recalling and queering the formal minimalism of Donald Judd), theater props, and vernacular utility (urban scaffolding, temporary structures of theater and carnival, things made urgently to momentarily house, support or contain), and yet the function of each object remains oscilatory and unstable. In an attempt to produce a system of logic that is repetitive, and compulsive but frustratingly opaque, Cadman produces an erotics of thought wherein resolution is denied through proposition.
In Prosthetic Language, long painted slats inscribed (in the negative) stand upright in a box-like column in a deliberate reference to Roman fasces, Roni Horn, and the literal meaning of the f-slur. Words flicker in and out of visibility, revealed through the nudity of the wood (the words are inscribed by a technique of masking but are eroded by low contrast). Here, language behaves less as communication than as a remnant of the monumental, a tortured fragment of institutional discipline, a literal propped-object that utilizes borrowed and/or corrupted language from the artist’s research.
In Model I and Model II the lexicon of the installation is expanded through modular wooden forms that recall disciplinary, bureaucratic and erotic infrastructure: peep shows, confessional booths, bathroom stalls, pillories, and study carrels. They point toward the architectures through which ideologies of order, labor, institutional power and knowledge are organized and propogated, while also revealing their absurdity, theatricality, and fragility.
The inclusion of the found image SHOW WORLD CENTER situates these sculptural propositions within the more concrete psychic geography of Times Square, building on the conceptual foundation of artists and thinkers such as Tom Burr and Samuel R. Delany. Times Square’s infamous history as a red light district and cruising ground, “cleaned up,” and gentrified, gives the rest of the work a more tangible connection to the real-world stakes of what might otherwise might appear to be merely abstract and conceptual. The voyeuristic framing of the image, the camera’s gaze situated behind an audience of empty adorondack chairs in the dark, carnivalesque interior of the Show World Center peep show, resensualizes the work through mood and texture as well as site.
The wooden stairs are an oblique reference to the last from of the 1926 silent film The Sunshine of Paradise Alley, in which the love interets sit on a tenement stoop about to embrace when a blanket is dropped over them from above -- a gesture of censorship that transforms intimacy into a site of suspended resolution, where a spectacle of intimacy is alluded to but hidden and deferred, resulting in a surreal image with a sculptural resonance. The conspicuos absence of the figures in Cadman’s version, plays with the theatrics of objecthood -- leaving action and subject undefined but implied.
Nearby, Toll, a small handbell perched on a plywood shelf, punctuates the installation with another signal of order and of time. Hidden in the rafters, it is an Easter egg, rewarding a slow, patient encounter. The bell is an invocation, a warning, a marker of attention, presence, and beginnings and ends. Unstruck, it too is a ominous monument to potential.
The final stint of the installation is a saw horse table with a binder of the artist’s research as well as a miniature slide viewer, a private peep show. This found object, from the 1970s, again resensualizes the work and implicates the veiwer though their participation through the act of looking.
As a whole, the body of work treats language and form as parallel prostheses: systems that extend thought and communicate it while simultaneously estranging it. The sculptures speak through restraint, tracing the contours of an essay wherein looking is inextricable from thought, communication is mediated by the unsayable and the unknowable, and redaction brings us closer to truth by acknowledging what cannot be shared.