Five on the First

April 2026
Adam Linn

“My practice contorts the familiar into uncanny realities steeped in seduction. Using a voluptuous visual language, I create drawings that probe relationships between sexuality, power, gender, desire and representation. My subjects are intimate close-ups of objects that typically evade visibility due to their ordinariness. Forms like doorknobs, keyholes, handles, faucets and banisters come alive with dynamism and sensuality, leveraging their mundane-ness into evocations of the erotic. By zooming in I am able to zoom out, transforming commonplace fixtures into body parts and jungle gym-like worlds. Through a layered process combining colored pencil, watercolor and acrylic gouache, I coax static forms into sultry slippages that remodel inert objects into active beings. Saturated, artificial colors pool like liquid across figurative crevasses and protrusions. These exaggerated hues morph stark utilitarian material into electrified industrial flamboyance. Rooted in queer experience, my work fuses personal medical histories with sex and sexuality to evoke a surreal space of bodily allusion. This gesture renders an affinity for things existing and mingling together while thrusting themselves at the viewer in some unanticipated solicitation. Forms touch and feel one another as if they are animate themselves, implicating the audience in a perverse dynamic conjuring connection, intimacy and internal discovery.”

CV