Every construction site needs a guy like Adam Viens. Mounds of detritus pile up on these sites. Most people see them as useless junk to be tossed in a dumpster and hauled away. Viens, who works on construction sites, sees them, thinks they are beautiful, takes them home and makes art out of them.
What Viens sees in his collection of odds and ends varies from day to day. His final decision on their meaning – in and of themselves and alongside other art materials – may not emerge until he is done with a work.
“Each material has a certain association, a social connotation, which may seem random,” Viens says. “It’s like a dream, which may seem out of whack, but when you pick it apart, makes sense.”
A collection of Viens’ mixed-media assemblages is on exhibit now at ArtWalk at Hartford Public Library.
A series of works hangs on each side of partitions in the gallery. Looking west, the palette is earth-tones, tan, brown, black and gray. Looking east, there are sunnier elements of sky blue and yellow. The colors reflect the passage of time.
“Life experiences that may seem dismal in the present, you look back on them and they seem less dismal,” he says. “Sometimes life seems to make sense and other times not.”
The working materials, too, comment on the transitory nature of being: fleeting moments seen in photographs, a shipping crate, now-obsolete ledgers, feathers, time cards, an empty crate that once held fruit, wood that long ago was new that is now distressed and falling apart.
Another piece, “Cargo,” is made up of a part of a cargo container, a plastic bag filled with cigarette butts, and torn-out pages of economic textbooks and Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
“One [economics] is a trivial stress. One [Frankl] is existential. There’s always a balancing act,” Viens says. “We’re in a culture that is sterile of order and meaning and beauty. We have an obligation in our soul to find it. I don’t know how to find it but I know there is meaning in the search.”
ADAM VIENS: LINGUISTICS BEHELD is at ArtWalk, on the third floor of Hartford Public Library, at 600 Main St. in Hartford, until June 29. hplct.org.
On Other Walls
The Paradise City Arts Festival runs May 26 to 28 at Three County Fairgrounds, 54 Old Ferry Road in Northampton, with work for sale by more than 250 artists and artisans from around the country. Admission is $14, $12 seniors, $8 students, children younger than 12 free. paradisecityarts.com.
“Paper Possibilities: An Exploration of Chaos / Order” is the show at Farmington Valley Arts Center, 25 Arts Center Lane in Avon, until June 30, with a closing reception from 2 to 4 p.m. artsfvac.org.
Sarah Paolucci’s paintings will be up at bin 228 wine bar, 228 Pearl St. in Hartford, from May 17, opening with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m., until June 30. facebook.com/events
“Spring Song,” an exhibit of wall installations by Kim Sobel, is at Charter Oak Cultural Center, 21 Charter Oak Ave. in Hartford, until June 1. Also at the Charter Oak in the same time frame is “Mosaic Affair: Portraits by Pierre Sylvain. charteroakcenter.org.
“Two Lives, One Passion: American Impressionist Paintings and Sketches by William Jurian Kaula and Lee Lufkin Kaula,” the first exhibit of work by the Boston-based impressionist painters, is at D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts at Springfield Museums, 21 Edwards St. in Springfield, until Sept. 9. springfieldmuseums.org.
Stanwyck Cromwell will show his work at Gallery on the Green, on the town green in Canton, from May 25 to June 24. Another solo exhibit is “Along the Waterline,” photographs by Richard Alan Cohen. And a third exhibit, a multi-artist show “Fine Art and Flowers,’ will be up for the same time period. The opening reception is June 2 from 6 to 9 p.m. galleryonthegreen.org.
