British born
Adam Chodzko is an internationally recognised artist whose extensive career boasts an impressive oeuvre of timeless works spanning the mediums of film, photography, installation, drawing and performance. Born in London and now based in Whitstable, Kent, Chodzko completed his MA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths University in 1994 and was one of the much sought-after artists selected for the infamous
’Sensations’ exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997.
Chodzko’s works are about relationships, behaviours and essentially - being human. Like an anthropologist and a psychologist, he explores our conscious and unconscious behaviours - our connections to the world around us and within us. On one level Chodzko’s works are like documentaries of the world, often using found objects, archival material, or observations of the seemingly every day and ordinary. Yet, through his exploration of our more unconscious behaviours, there also exists an element of fantasy. For the Venice Biennale (1995) Chodzko combined a kind of social experiment with the world of fantasy when he placed an advertisement in a sex contact magazine, which consisted of a charcoal drawing of a fairy-tale-like woodlands and the simple words -
‘Will you join me here?’. In this early work, and in many that followed, Chodzko asked audiences to participate in the ‘making’ of the art - therefore becoming part of the medium, the subject and the creative process.
Eyestorm had the great privilege of working with Chodzko in 2013, when invited guest curator Ben Lewis - an award winning documentary filmmaker and art critic - was asked to choose a selection of artists he believed would ‘last the distance’. As part of this project, Chodzko who Lewis described as
“the secret star of the YBA’s” was commissioned to create a series of prints titled
Ask the Dust. The
Ask the Dust series were made from found 35mm slides which the artist picked up at flea markets and on eBay, depicting photographs from environmental disasters in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Uniquely, each print edition has its own distinct silhouette of dust, found naturally on the slide, and purposely not cleaned during the printing process. These dust marks have the ability to remove us from the actuality of the photograph, forming a kind of abstract dotted painting over the surface of the image. Yet in a documentary sense, they also ground us in reality, reminding us of the aged condition of the slides and the dark and damaged environments depicted. In a similar way to his Venice Biennale work,
Ask the Dust are works that jump between reality and fantasy.
Through his extensive and multi-media practice, Chodzko explores the very role of art today, and his believe that contemporary art - in all its absurdity and often surreal nature - can actually expand or reprogram the brain to induce changes in our behaviour. Chodzko’s short film
‘Deep Above’ (2015) plays out like a kind of meditative combination of moving image and sound, suggesting a way in which art could not only change our way of thinking about climate change, but perhaps in a more hypnotic way, have the power to change our behaviour completely. In this very ambitious approach, Chodzko believes art can have a very real effect on how we understand and improve the world we live in.
Adam Chodzko is today an internationally recognised artist with works in world-famous institutions such as the Tate and Saatchi collections. Notably, he has been exhibited at such prestigious institutions as the Royal Academy, the Tate Britain, Frieze Art Fair and Hayward Gallery. As one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists, he has been chosen to be part of a number of international exhibitions curated by the British Council, representing British art at the Venice Biennale, Mucsarnok Kunsthalle in Budapest, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. Chodzko continues to work on his Ask the Dust series with a number of these works now in private and public collections around the world.