Robert and Elisabeth Wilmers Building
Hemicycle Gallery

Adam Fuss (British, born 1961) works with early photographic processes and camera-less techniques to capture one-of-a-kind images. He is known for taking up nineteenth-century innovations in the medium, such as the photogram, which is made by placing objects on light-sensitive paper, with breathtaking results. In this way, Fuss subverts the primacy of the camera and celebrates the print as an independent object. By their very nature, his images capture an aspect of reality that is otherwise fleeting.

The exhibition features eighteen works that showcase Fuss's practice over three decades. It is primarily drawn from the Buffalo AKG's collection, with important loans from the artist and a private collection. Each work is a musing on the energy that exists between life and death. Collectively, they trace the development of the artist's My Ghost series, which he began in the early 1990s and continues to the present in his most recent work, Theia. About the series, Fuss states:

The ghost is, for me, not some external phenomenon but rather an emotional state or an unconscious state that acts as an intruder in the mundane or ordinary, frequently manifesting as the presence of an absence. The ghost is by nature neither fully physically and materially present nor completely nonexistent but in a state of “in between.” 

Fuss does not seek to manipulate his subjects; instead, he records their pure essence. This allows him to expose the inherent mystery of his images, leaving viewers to imagine a world beyond. The successive effects of a droplet on a pool or the motion of a snake as it slithers through water embody infinite movement and the creative energy only found in nature. Meanwhile, images of thick billowing smoke evoke the transmutational work of an ancient alchemist searching for answers to life's mysteries, and visions of crushed flowers recall just how fleeting beauty and life can be.