(Albuquerque, US)
Adam 5100 hails as one of the top stencil and cut paper artists around, producing works that evidence meticulous execution and a high level of craft. His paintings strongly lend themselves to the process involved with creating them. His childhood in Albuquerque, New Mexico was spent examining and interacting with the surfaces of the city through making graffiti art. His awareness of the structures we use every day but often overlook has become the subject of his current work: the buildings, doorways, fenced trees, discarded buses and chipped alley walls that fill our cities and map our lives. Through an intricate process of hand-cut stencils and enamel painting, he explores the relationship between our perceptions of the temporary and the eternal, uncovering the stories we have transcribed on an urban landscape filled with utilitarian objects.
Adam5100's works have taken on a satirical look, challenging concepts of modernity, using spaces as a language to describe forgotten places, and light to evoke their story and context within the present. His stencils represent hundreds of hours of meticulous work and fine detail, evoking the stunning absence of form in an image.
"We live in an ever-changing city sculpture, constantly being shaped, broken down and rebuilt again by countless personal human moments."
Learn the art of layering with Adam5100 by KQED: