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Adam Frelin (born 1973) is an American artist working in sculpture, video, photography, and performance. He received a BFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA University of California, San Diego. He has shown at venues such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Gateway Foundation, and College Art Association. Frelin has completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MacDowell Colony, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Helsinki International Artists Program, Youkobo Art Space, and Fine Arts Work Center, among others. Currently he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at SUNY University at Albany, and lives in Troy, NY.

Education
He received a BFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA University of California, San Diego.

Work
Frelin’s work uses art as a way to insert emblematic moments into everyday life. In his artwork these moments take place at points where our natural and constructed worlds intersect. Whether it’s an image, object, or action, each piece becomes it’s own narrative. Landscape, both natural and manmade, becomes the stage where they are set. These stories––in sculpture, performance, video, and photography––are little myths. Pedestrian and open-ended, they unfold like existential morality tales. The religious rituals Frelin took part in as a child had a strong effect on his artwork, specifically in the performative use of iconic images and objects. Stories of diligent devotees on difficult pilgrimages––driven and guided by truths larger than themselves––have helped to solidify a basic tenet into his art practice: the use of fantasy as a means toward connecting with reality. The characters in his stories invent their own devotional acts, such as carrying an endlessly long ladder; playing violin while careening down a river valley; or shoveling fire over a cliff. Frelin’s goal as an artist is to document and create images, objects and actions that tap into a shared visual vocabulary, functioning as icons of our contemporary world. As part of an essay written for Frelin’s book of photography, Trees Hit By Cars, Toby Kamps, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Menil Collection in Houston describes his work this way: “While he covers large physical and aesthetic territories, Frelin is aware that he works in a time of limited resources––natural and artistic. His is an art for the age of global warming. Even as he goes to great lengths to create and catalogue revelatory intercessions in the environment, Frelin realizes the hubris and the ultimate impossibility of bending the world to his will and his will to the world. As a countermeasure, he makes self-criticism a central part of his process. Frelin’s aesthetic and philosophical road––twisting and turning between human and natural, between theory and practice––is treacherous, but he also shows us that the marks left in the struggle for control can serve as portentous blazes on the trail.”

Firefall

Years ago while on vacation in California Frelin found out about an event that took place for almost a century at Yosemite National Park. Known as the "firefall," it involved shoveling large piles of hot embers over a cliff face as a nightly spectacle. Because the park officially ended this man-made event in the late 1960's, he decided to plan a recreation so that he and others could see it in person. Where he lives in the northeastern part of the US, the only place you can find a sheer cliff is at a stone quarry. A nearby cement plant with an open limestone mine took an interest in his project, and in 2012 they were able to stage the first firefall for a public audience in nearly a half century.

Terranauts

While studying landscape architecture in Japan, Frelin learned that many Japanese gardens are only meant to be viewed through a building that acts as a framing device. Looking for a reason to build a mobile unit that would similarly frame the landscape, he created a cardboard version large enough for two people to occupy, yet manageable enough to be easily moved. With text printed on the box that made it appear as if it once contained parts for NASA's Kepler mission (a satellite searching for habitable planets) he shot a short film in which a teenage couple finds and uses the discarded box as a means for exploring their own earthly habitat of Los Angeles.

Trees Hit By Cars

In 2005 Frelin drove 15,000 miles around the US in search of trees that had been hit by cars. He discovered them through various tactics: police reports, insurance claims, public knowledge, and chance encounters. In 2007 he was given the opportunity to have a book of these photographs printed. In the opening of the book he writes, “Growing up, there was a big oak tree at the bend of our street that appeared to grow stronger each time it was hit by a car. As a child I believed that it was the lives of those drivers that made it stronger, their life force collected by the tree on impact.” Along with the fifty photographs, the book contains an essay by curator Toby Kamps, and a commissioned short story by author Charles McLeod.

White Line

In 2005 Frelin strung a long line of fluorescent lights along a steel cable between two hills on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. The line of lights slightly bowed to mimic the curve of the valley 50' below. When seen in this natural context fluorescent light is peculiarly similar to moonlight, yet the shadows it created, and the manner in which the valley was illuminated, were almost supernatural in appearance. In 2007 a similar version was commissioned by the American Embassy for the International House of Japan. "White Line (Tokyo)" functioned like an effects machine, transforming their Japanese garden into an eerie, psychedelic wonderland.