Adam Liam Rose
Adam Liam Rose (b. 1990) is an artist exploring the visual language and architecture of “safety.” Born in Jerusalem and raised mostly in the United States, his multi-disciplinary practice investigates the propagandistic tactics governments employ to distract populations from real or perceived threats, often to legitimize power and assert control. Rose was a fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts' AIM Program, The Drawing Center’s Viewing Program, and the Art & Law Program. He was awarded artist residencies at Triangle Arts Association (Brooklyn, NY), Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, MI), among others.
What’s your earliest memory of encountering art?
The earliest memory of encounting art was at the Costume and Jewelry Department of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. They have a collection of traditional Jewish dress from around the world. I was also drawn to blue and white glazed ceramics from China, something in that color combination and the meticulous ornamentation drew me in. That's the stuff that I remember as a child. It feels a bit silly!
It's not silly at all! I was obsessed with traffic cones.
I also remember that I’d make my brother draw VHS cassette covers for me. I’d say “make a copy of this Little Mermaid cover for me” and he would draw it.
How Warholian of you! Beyond running your Factory, can you tell me what it was like growing up in Jerusalem? You were overlooking Shuafat, the Palestinian refugee camp. Was it clear to you that there was a distinction between your Jewish family and those in Shuafat?
I don't think I fully understood the nuances, but I knew I was not supposed to go over there. There was no physical barrier or wall at the time, and I could hear the call to prayer every morning. There was an “us and them” mentality, a tension that was constantly in the background. What interests me about those years is that the barrier was imaginary, and existed only in our heads, but eventually a physical barrier was built.
The idea of imaginary borders reminds me of your piece Paradise of Greenery.
That work is based off of a mural on route 443, a road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that cuts directly through the Palestinian West Bank. This road is the fastest route between the cities, but is often avoided for safety concerns. The Israeli government put up the separation barrier as a means of protecting Israeli commuters from attack, and hired a government contractor to paint a mural depicting an aqueduct with blue skies and green pastures. It looks like a green screen, blue screen, Super Mario land. It feels like an animation - trying to imagine a space beyond that is not Palestinian. So with Paradise of Greenery, I was thinking about using the abstraction of color to contemplate this erasure. I’m really interested in these “cheap tricks” of film and television where optical illusion, green screen, and other various visual aids create a type of numbing or complacency, allowing the government to assert control over a distracted populace.
Tell me more about how you started building “stages”.
I started out making these sculptural “stages” or sets while thinking about the tension stages hold. They are spaces that reflect the history of what occured on them, their current state of action or inaction, and the promise of a future happening. This layering of time fascinates me. Often the stages I make reference state architecture projects like watchtowers, barrier walls and bunkers that assert both control and the illusion of safety.
I’m thinking of your series Stages of Fallout based on US government manuals for nuclear fallout shelters from the 1950s. These “stages of perceived safety” offered a relatively thin veneer of actual security in the face of nuclear war.
The performance of safety is more important than the actual safety of the structure because it's never about actually helping the common person. I think we all unfortunately learned this during Covid. Part of the inspiration came from a 1950s propaganda film Operation Q, in which the US government bombed a fake town called Survival Town in the Nevada desert. It’s about performing safety knowledge of nuclear attacks and asserting control over the unknowable and destructive. Many people involved in the filming ended up getting cancer from radiation exposure, so this safety performance had terminal effects. I like to think of the long term effects of narrative, storytelling and these kinds of performances. The series is titled Stages of Fallout because it focuses on the stage, but also stages as moments. As a queer person I think of moments of falling out of society, falling out of the nuclear family, falling out of community. What does Fallout mean? How long does it take?
You bring up this idea of falling out of society and family, of being the other in many ways. Is this something you’ve felt?
Politically, astrologically, I’m what stands out in my family. It's fine. It's complicated. My family is not dogmatic or religious, but we do have some tensions around belief systems. I’m the one queer in the family, super left leaning radical, non Zionist. I think about the fact that I left Israel when I was 12, which is such a formative time. I left at a tumultuous moment in the region and felt relieved that I would no longer be required to serve in the Israeli military, which is something I feared as a child. I've been doing a lot of work to figure out why I talk about safety in my work and a lot of it comes back to growing up in the machismo of Israel and the pressure to perform in a certain way.
What does safety mean to you now?
I think safety is just feeling genuinely yourself, with whoever you call your family.
I think that's a beautiful definition.
I can't ever know that my body's going to be safe especially with how we're treating this world or the systems all of us have created to live in. I feel the most free when I’m not so concerned about my performance. Safety is a mental state. Places can contribute to it, but ultimately, it's hard to talk about safe space without thinking about danger in relation to it. I don't know that you can really truly feel safe when you name it.
As queer folx, it can be hard to feel safe and centered in ourselves when we have been programmed to perform for other people’s comfort.
I'm realizing my voice changes depending on how comfortable I am. I was taking voice lessons, which were like therapy. I've always loved singing but I'm always self conscious.
Where would you sing?
My mom and I would sing in the car. Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman…
The classics!
It was empowering. The voice teacher said I have a very good voice, but that I can have better control of it and know how to use it. It’s all about breath.
Everything is about breath, it’s pretty crazy.
Yeah, I meditate now every day. I'm doing Headspace. I have days where it's hard, but I still do it. With meditation you sit with the shifts of life. The more we accept that relationships change, change is a constant and that we are all going to die, the more at peace we can be. No one stays the same. People say they're never going to change, but they're already gone and that’s ok.
You’ve mentioned a lot about arriving at peace and clarity through mindfulness and a level of surrender. Do you want your work to impart this to viewers?
I want my art to make me feel like myself. I want to be making work that feels liberating, and hopefully other people can feel that too. It’s ultimately about a feeling of liberation.
Thinking about this journey within, let’s return to the Fall Out series. They began as comments on the ways that power structures create false stages of safety, but they have become more abstract. Are these now mental landscapes?
The drawings are now about feelings. They started from architecture but became more psychedelic and about questioning if my relationships are spaces of emotional safety for me. After my boyfriend and I broke up in summer of 2020, I was smoking a lot of weed and taking mushrooms. I was asking myself what it means to open yourself up to someone and then to watch the fallout of the relationship in stages. I was thinking about the intense feeling of love I had for this person when we met and wondering where that goes once things end. That's slowly where the architecture started becoming a crater, a carving out of space, a wound and an opening up for new possibilities. I’m interested in exploring how we quantify the energetic traces these types of connections leave on us over time.
I love that you’re using astrological language to describe human relationships. We each have our own gravitational pull, come together and sometimes change orbit. Those encounters are intense, but can have beautiful long term effects. I’m thinking of icy comets striking earth, which ultimately brought water and life to the planet.
It's about entering an expansive mental space, but keeping grounded at the same time. I depict the land and craters but also the celestial. It's about trying to locate balance, it's a meditation - being present and also allowing for whatever comes through.
A picture I have is lying on the earth, looking up at the stars. The only way that you can feel safe while looking up and dreaming is having that strong support of the ground.
That's a beautiful image.
Often we need to feel safe and supported to be open to the beauty around us. When I'm stressed, I don’t have the capacity to admire much around me. We think true beauty stops us in our tracks, but most beauty is more subtle - it’s all around us all the time. It's easy to forget this when we are all so busy and constantly looking down at our phones.
Absolutely!
Wow, time to end my philosophy session! Do you have any advice for artists out there?
Try something new because I want to try something new.
I love that!
I think that about covers it. From Architecture to Feelings by Adam Liam Rose.
[Both laugh]
As a queer person, the discussion of safety as a feeling that is elusive when it’s even in question really hit home
Expressions of craters or wounds as opening toward possibility definitely resonates with a certain spiritual essentiality—having obsessed this year over O’Hara’s postwar Meditations phrase about heartbreak making him feel “more adventurous”, I feel greatly reassured by Adam’s presentation of a more contemporary visual and philosophical context for some perhaps parallel guiding thoughts! Many thanks.