Text by Simon Shim-Sutcliffe

 

The works of Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw reflect on the features and operations of urban areas and their hinterlands. Focusing upon jointly obvious and overlooked aspects of our built environments and the utilitarian entities which inhabit them, Shaw crafts architecture-like models, sculptural microcosms, and precise structures; driving to create a syncretic landscape of unruly forms. Undulating between items of regional specificity and global ubiquity, Shaw’s typological studies dive into the physical remembrance of how we inhabit space. Seizing on the parallaxes of our own invisible memorials, he mines the quarries of our social geography and the narratives which enfold them. His slowly crafted sculptures become a compass, directing us towards distant places and times; calling into question the endless speculation of our constructed world.

 

As with Atget, in his vast photographic project depicting the vitrines and reflective glass storefronts of Paris, erased through its renewal, Shaw’s latest series, Gateways, focuses on the unraveling of modernism in his hometown of Edmonton, Alberta. Here we are called to enter into the psycho-social playground from which his sculptures draw. Gateways cuts through the city’s sprawling grid, passing through its river valley of time, where pasts and futures are examined. These are the places where Shaw works and wanders, from near and from afar, as a traveler of the edge. The sprawling industrial parks, oil refineries, strip malls, campus grounds and car-centric suburbs through which his artwork drifts, congeal together as a Piranesian portal. We gradually break down these sites, digesting them through his constructions; we are lodged as a skull in the belly of the machine.

 

Gateways targets the core drive of urbanity itself, which lies in the development of capital. Shaw reflects how boom-and-bust cycles within the province’s petroleum industry affect land use, and in turn, human behavior. How do the far flung seeds of oil production in Alberta’s tar sands, operate as tendrils to the heart of the city? And what attitudes do they foster? What ends up here, in cultural terms, becomes like another fossil in the soil - another layer of bitumen in the grains of sand. Something to be excavated, agitated and filtered, from the gateway terminus to the nodal imperium. Shaw works through the region’s petrochemical matrix, where metal and concrete relics are brought to the surface as the bones of labor. Sculpture-making becomes an act of repair, as the unraveling mechanical impulse of the derelict excavator cab and the highway wildlife underpass are reconnected to possible futures, full of shared potentiality. Working from images culled through civic collections, municipally focused forums and blogs, classified listings, and communally sourced hosting services, this active living-history materializes competing senses of identification.

 

From the turn-of-the-century onwards, Edmonton crafted an architecture of relative speed and volatility. In this light, Shaw’s sculptures frame the oil-inflated capital as a sandbox for civic desires and indifferences. A cannibalizing skyline plays proxy to cultural movements happening further afield. Meanwhile, encircling highway expansions built atop bygone coal facilities reconstitute the limits of ‘natural’ spaces, through sustained suburban expansion (ie. whitemud compass, 2024). These sites are neither distinct nor blending. Rather, they articulate their own necessity, and more importantly - that of the occupational landscapes which feed them. Gateways roots these staged relics within the self-deracinating cityscape, as gum lodged into the sidewalk. The sculptures' precision-made paint jobs encompass the rapid obsolescence of Shaw’s motifs. Layers of industrial acrylic, in their yellows, grays, greens, blacks and beiges, detail in abundance the shadows and contours of each and every protrusion. Painstakingly made; crafted, carved, routed, painted, brushed, and sanded, it is almost as if they were never fabricated at all and were ‘simply’ always this way.

 

Shaw’s technical sculptures present themselves as readers to acts of infrastructural encounters, a skirmish with the physical memory of life. bucket I and bucket II, 2024, function like an abstract shell game in the constant transport of these various states and forms, ie. piles, lumps, and wedges. Heavy equipment cabs as pc210-8, 2024, become consumer tier medical diagrams for metabolizing the landscape. TCF 521 - 5000 - 60026, 2024, references mid century half-cab tractors, tank trucks, and freight cars which once populated terminals, mines and processing plants; a solitary enclosure coated with an oily glazing. The objects rest with a more-than-human scale, like a medieval relief tomb. Their entrails are physically spliced, anchored, and amalgamated. Utilizing already-made industrial grade materials in their construction, the objects come together in this riveted and punctuated space of boxcar partitions. Working in factory-like synchronicity to create a constellation out of their imbued materiality, thermoplastic adhesives and polystyrene merge beneath PVA soaked newsprint casings. An exacting procedural vocabulary becomes infused with a terminological purpose and drive; where sculptural origins bridge backwards and observe a series of minute views. When we look back, we back track, but what we see is no longer there.

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All images courtesy of Wschód & GRAYSC.

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Wschód