Erica Adams

Artist's Bio:

Erica H. Adams is an interdisciplinary artist, a contributing editor for the Belgian arts quarterly "This Side Up!," and an Associate at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She works with photography, macro-media movies, painting, glass, printmaking, mosaics and sculpture. In the coming year, Ms. Adams will be working as a visiting artist in Poland for The 5th International Workshop & Seminar, 2000 and at The Chiapas Photography Project in Chiapas, Mexico.

Her work is in the Polaroid Permanent Collection and collections in Germany, Italy, Argentina, and the United States. Her selected exhibitions include: "Hippie an Anonymous Group Show", 88 Room, Boston, Massachusetts, 1996; MOBIUS, Boston, Massachusetts, 1995; "Photo Works1993", Erector Square Gallery, 1993; "Acceptable Entertainment" Independent Curators Inc. traveling show, 1988-90; "Schema" Baskerville & Watson Gallery, New York City, 1987; "Boston Now: Photography", Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts, 1985.

Artist's Statement:

The materials of art should express the concepts.

Title:"Shallow Water"

My sculpture entitled "Shallow Water" is a model of an analogy drawn from Nature and realized through the surface look of Virtual Reality -- pure engineered signal, zero noise-- now, subverted, a virtual trope for conditions at the end of the 20th century.

Title: "6 Pac"

"6 Pac" is a V-R earthwork: debris rippling SHALLOW WATER.

When shallow waters become super-heated or imbalanced, Nature seeks to balance it through a waterspout.
A waterspout is a hurricane that forms over water. Visible from the air, a dark spot can be seen surrounded by currents of alternating dark and light areas. These currents' fast, upwards, spiraling motion are lifted by high velocity winds to form a wind tunnel or column of water whose center is invisible. Reaching the top of the wind tunnel, the super-heated waters cool and condense, descending as rain.

Ms. Adams would like to thank Nancy Moskin for her work in rendering "6 Pac", Greg Jacobsen and Joan Pumphret for their work on the sounds and the technical support of Dana Moser and Jon Swan.

Technical Description:

Proximity of a viewer in physical space to the "Shallow Water" sculpture triggers playback of pre-recorded audio in both real space and VR. Proximity of an avatar to the "6 Pac" model causes the same actions. A real-time video stream from a camera is warped by a software agent and then mapped onto the 6 cans.