Jim Adams: The Irretrievable Moment

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SITE Photography

Jim Adams, "Nighthawks (Homage to Hopper)," 1995

acrylic on canvas, 120 cm x 85 cm. Photo by Scott Massey.

Artist Talk and Launch of Exhibition

Saturday, April 8 | 6:30−9pm

Celebrate the opening of our spring exhibitions Jim Adams: The Irretrievable Moment and High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese. A talk with longtime Surrey-based exhibiting artist Jim Adams will start at 6:30pm; reception at 7:30pm.

Panel Discussion: Jim Adams—Of Milestones & Myths

Sunday, April 23 | 2:30–4pm

Jim Adams: The Irretrievable Moment co-curators Laura Schneider and Jordan Strom will be joined by writer Yaniya Lee and artist Sylvia Grace Borda to discuss the significance of Jim Adams’s artmaking.

Exhibition Tour

Wednesday, May 24 | 7−8:30pm

Want to know more about the exhibits you’re seeing? Get behind-the-scenes information about the artwork on display in Jim Adams: The Irretrievable Moment with Jordan Strom, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections.

A well-known and well-loved Surrey-based artist is launching the biggest exhibition of his career. From April 8 to June 11, Surrey Art Gallery invites you to see five decades’ worth of Jim Adams’s artmaking in Jim Adams: The Irretrievable Moment. His paintings often combine historical events with speculative futures, real people in imagined situations, and mythological people in contemporary scenarios.

A strong sense of narrative tension infuses Adams’s landscapes and portraits. A Japanese bride is on her way to get married less than a minute after the first atomic bomb is dropped. A contrail is faintly visible in the sky overhead. Other paintings envision a peaceful last evening before a meteor streaks across the sky. Locals enjoy their drinks in a White Rock Starbucks as the blue and red lights of a patrol car are reflected in the window. Adams says, “I’m always looking for the irretrievable moment where you’re committed to the action but the action hasn’t actually happened yet.”

In addition to these dramatic and, in some cases, more ominous works, Adams also does humorous paintings. His UFO fragment series inserts 3D objects like pencils, photographic negatives, and newspaper clippings into idyllic suburban landscapes.

Drawing from influences as diverse as late twentieth-century comics and science fiction to European Romantic landscape painting, classical myth, and African-American history, Adams’s art probes a number of themes including the hidden dramas of suburbia, the encroachment of military culture on everyday life, and the effects of technology and consumerism on young male identity.

In Adams’s art, moments from the past can’t be reclaimed, only partially glimpsed and transformed into something new in the realization of the artwork.

Jim Adams: The Irretrievable Moment is a two-part retrospective exhibition developed with The Reach Gallery Museum in Abbotsford. The exhibition brings together an unprecedented selection of the artist’s work from over five decades of artmaking, including many never-before seen artworks. The Reach Gallery Museum will focus on Adam’s combined use of mythology, youth culture, and science fiction from the last two decades of his practice. It will run in Abbotsford from May 25 to September 3.