Adam Moore, Avalanche (2022). Shown here performed at qap.digital launch at REFERENCE.POINT, London, December 2022.
An avalanche occurs when a layer of snow collapses and slides downhill. Avalanche is an intervention, a performance for a party. It collapses the boundaries between public and private. And slides between serendipitous circumstances. Augmenting the conditions of perception and display with his unconventional and anti-artifice handling of dance, choreography, intimate objects and music Moore triggers an avalanche through the layers of the social landscape, drawing the party into his performance and merging with it.
Adam Moore, Avalanche (2022). Shown here performed at qap.digital launch at REFERENCE.POINT, London, December 2022. Videos: Seda Echo, Pierce Eldridge.
Avalanche centres the particularity of the notion of the abstraction of the British-St.Lucian artist as he roams the party – a conceptual hunting ground – for indeterminate, intuitive interventions with others. An intermittent and reductive strategy designed to emerge from the special conditions of a party. For a special occasion – where guests are amenable, open to influence, playful even – Avalanche is a disarming examination of the artifice, durability and (in)stability of performance and identity.
Around Moore’s Blackness and his fifteen-minute skincare regime, archival interview citations weave an opaque aural cocoon. Patchworking contemporary, postminimalist and post-studio references from Kathryn Brown on Adam Pendleton to Dennis Oppenheim, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Richard Serra, Moore questions his relationship to these influences and broader cultural relationships to these sensibilities. He applies one mask before another.
Coordinated exacting and chance operations liberate different ways of looking at the artist and guests, blurring the contours between artist-audience relations, activating performative and self-reflective modes of observation, imbuing the artwork with a collective aura. A public intervention. A work of art. A backdrop for reflection. Sometimes, a place where nobody knows. Avalanche is a site of formulas in flux.
qap.digital launch photos by Eda Sancakdar.
Music: War, The Seven Tin Soldiers.
Special thanks to Queer Art Projects and REFERENCE.POINT.
