Mac Adams Questions Photographic Truth at gb Agency

Mac Adams's exhibition 'Gone from My Sight' at gb agency in Paris (January 25–February 22, 2020) explores the trace, perception, and the unreliability of photographic evidence. The show features a new color series, 'The Liminal Body,' where four identical prints of a photograph progressively fade into a monochrome plane, eliminating figuration. Works like 'Gone from My Sight' (2019), 'Sliding into Pink' (2019), 'Mutilated Photograph' (2019), and 'Black Leather' (2019) use color as a psychological clue—green for vegetation, pink for eroticism, mauve for melancholy. Vintage pieces such as 'Scarfs' (1975) and the Mystery Fragments 'Greta,' 'Candy,' and 'Julia' (all 1981) are shown for the first time at the gallery, with physical clues extracted from the photographs. The installation 'Cartography of a Crime' (2019) mixes real crime scene photos from Mexican police archives with Adams's own fabricated traces on a table, blurring truth and fiction. 'The Last Waltz' (1981–2020) pairs a vinyl record playing Chopin's Nocturnes with a newspaper clipping about a jealous husband who killed his wife, using music as a clue. Adams's practice, rooted in early 20th-century Soviet film theory (Kuleshov effect), questions whether photographs can still serve as proof or are merely projections of the viewer's unconscious.