THE STOOGE - 2014

The Stooge features a series of paintings, an animation and an architectural intervention in which solid blocks of black intrude from the gallery windows, protruding through a wall and into the closest manhole. Adam Douglass is the artist creating The Stooge and similar to the intergalactic freeway crossing the path of our planet earth in Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglass has created an implosion of solidified darkness restricting access to the gallery. 

This block of black reappears in paintings and his animation.Animating the abstract is a continual obsession for Douglass. The stop-motion animation literally animates Douglass’ back catalogue of abstract paintings, photographed, manipulated and personified. In the paintings, ‘deep gouges in the triple layered canvases become passages between different orders of materiality and space. They suggest an interest in theological debate surrounding the issue of how a supra-material being (God) can govern a material order.’1. Douglass is exploring the relationships of contemporary physics and cosmogony to ideas of spirituality through concepts such as antimatter, black holes and dark energy.

1. Plagne, Francis. Implosion is Compulsory. Exhibition Catalogue for Adam Douglass.