2025
2022-2024
WINDOWS SCAFFOLDS AND VISIONS OF EXCESS 2025
THE SUNSHINE OF PARADISE ALLEY 2024
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WINDOWS SCAFFOLDS AND VISIONS OF EXCESS is an attempt to produce the experience of communication and isolation as provisional pedagogical instruments -- modular, pared down, simplified structures that stage a precarious but tangible alliance between body and object, presence and absence, description and anarchy. Using constellation, repetition, and iteration as a means, this body of work is a meditation on the spatial choreography of an erotic and violent underworld (a world of desolate but transfigurative gravity), spectacle as a site of coersion and humiliation, and the inarticulate, abject compulsions hidden behind the arras of formal thought.
Abstract but familiar forms made of raw plywood, echo furniture (both recalling and queering the formal minimalism of Donald Judd), theater props, and vernacular architecture (urban scaffolding, temporary structures of theater and carnival, things made urgently to momentarily house, support or contain) -- and yet the actual 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 Prop Corner, long painted slats inscribed (in the negative) stand upright in a box-like column -- a deliberate reference to Roni Horn, Roman fasces (a symbol of Roman imperialism later appropriated by fascism -- untied, nuetered by disorder, they evoke and complicate themes of discipline and punishment), and the literal meaning of the f-slur (the same etymologyical origin as fasces). 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 fails as communication and rather appears as a remnant of the monumental, a tortured fragment of institutional discipline, a prop (propped-object). The insciptions are enigmatic -- borrowed and/or corrupted language from the artist’s research:
GAME RUNNER’S PROP PLAYER
IN THE NOSEBLEEDS IN THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND
THAT HOTBED OF ASSIGNATION CLICKETY - CLACK
LASSITUDE NAUSEA AND AGONIZING DESIRE
EVERYTHING OUT OF ORDER EVERYTHING IN DISARRAY
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, insisting on 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 draped with a wool blanket are an oblique reference to the last frame of the 1926 silent film The Sunshine of Paradise Alley, pictured below. As the film’s love interests lean in for a kiss, a blanket is dropped on them from above. The conspicuos absence of figures in Cadman’s version is a play on the theatrics of objecthood -- leaving action and subject undefined but implicit.
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 rewards a slow, patient encounter. The bell is an invocation, a warning, a marker of attention, presence, and beginnings and ends. Unstruck, it is a ominous monument to potential.
In the final stint of the installation the viewer encounters a saw horse table arrayed with a binder of the artist’s research as well as a miniature slide viewer, a private peep show designed to be kept on a key chain. This found object, from the 1970s, again, resensualizes the work and implicates the veiwer by their participation in looking.
As a whole, this body of work treats language and form as parallel prostheses: systems that extend thought and communicates it while simultaneously estranging it. The sculptures speak through their 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.