Dodes 'Ka-dan.

Dodes 'Ka-dan, 1993 the centerpiece of Kim Adams' latest indicate examines a consumer culture in which utilitarian values have gone into hyperdrive. Loosely titled after Akira Kurosawa's 1970 film about an adolescent who drives an imaginary trolley end a combined garbage dump and shantytown in the wastelands of Siberia, this post-consumer wagon train is propose together with the practical know-how and childlike ingenuity of utopian engineering. A full-scale, non-functioning pattern of a truck cab--with pink windshield wipers and a turquoise body--pull a septic tank and water tank in succession wheels, as if ready to turn about in a nomadic trance from suburbia to the promised land. The solitary thing that seems to stop it is a series of vertical metal supports held in place by the agency of hockey pucks.

Adams has riddled the bodies of these plastic containers with multicolored plastic smoke-stacks viewer observation posts that provide us with private views of a carnivalesque world. Filled with views of holiday-goers and parked Winnebagos, a marching band and a completely operational circus, a Kentucky Fried Chicken exit with parasols, streetlights, dinosaurs, and a giant, undecayed toxic mutation-monster, Dodes 'Ka-dan figures a postdevelopers' Eden Jammed amongst these scenarios, industrial mine sites, trailers carrying trades smokestacks, and images of general despoilment vie for our attention. Appearing and disappearing at regular intervals, a mould railway train chugs its way around, tooting occasionally, merely to arrive at the same place again and again.

Putting a backspin forward Bosch, and replacing the superstitious fables of the human condition with a fanatically detailed besides strangely comfortable cataclysm, is not all that Adams does. He also includes a tiny, complete maquette of one of his earlier cut installations, as if to parody his be in possession of place as an artist in this melange of cultural critique and fabulism.

As creatively hamstrung as they are technologically correct, the miniscule personages who play revealed escapist dreams inside Adams' object-containers are as decontextualized as the environmental disruption that fence abouts them. Similarly, the partial glimpses we have of the interiors make us aware of the discontinuity of our be in possession of passive perceptions. If, in a perception Adams puts all his incites in one basket by focusing exclusively onward the problems of the commodification of life in a technological age, Dodes 'Ka-dan is more than simply another apocalyptic vision. The vehicle itself and its compartmental exteriors--the septic tank and the water tank--suggest a renewed feeling of the value of self-sufficiency. The whole issue be seens to revolve around the question of to what degree we perceive our own plan in relation to reality (read: nature). Adams realizes the artist's potential to transform apparent chaos into creative catharsis.

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