Alex McAdoo’s

Missing Pieces

March 17- April 22, 2023

The rules of seeing are always in flux. From the cavern flames which lit the first wall smears to today’s VR drone cameras which can fling our sight thousands of miles away with unrestricted movement, our understanding of what’s knowable has a history entangled with the technologies of sight and representation. For millennia past and for millennia to come we have asked and will ask one another, “do you see what I see?”

Martha's is thrilled to announce, Missing Pieces a solo exhibition of new paintings by artist Alex McAdoo. Armed with drones and 360 cameras along with an unwavering commitment to the import of early Asian physicists and mathematicians, McAdoo presents a suite of surreal scenes depicting the American West Coast through a reparative lens which recenters the artist’s multiracial Brown heritage and offers us to envision a landscape where a void is merely a space for possibility.

Missing Pieces takes inspiration from 7th-century mathematician Brahmagupta and 11th-century scientist Alhazen, applying the theory of "partial zero" as a vector for mapping McAdoo's Indian identity onto the landscapes as they disappear into the ether and recombine into something new. Born in present-day Iraq in 965, Abu Ali al Hasan ibn al-Haytham, later Latinized as Alhazen, was a multidisciplinary scientist and first to correctly explain vision and the refraction of light. Though these concepts were foundational to the work of Newton, the invention of the camera, and the history of painting, Alhazen's name became obscured through imperialist revisions of history. A similar fate befell Brahmagupta, the man who first delineated zero as a computational number: the man who turned “nothing” into “something.”

Today, in a world in which our daily lives are necessarily impeded by screens and paintings are supposedly under threat by artificial intelligence, Alex McAdoo generates “portals to infinity” which work alongside technologies evolutionary and ancient. Raised in Washington and currently residing in Los Angeles, Missing Pieces follows McAdoo's journeys up and down the West Coast from his hometown to his new life, capturing surreal snapshots of liminal moments across the Pacific in swirling oil on linen. The thickly-smudged blurs of trees and the occasional figure warp inward in kaleidoscopic reverie, folding what might be unending space into a void which swallows up the sun with joy, becoming unending once more. McAdoo prefers to think of zero, like Brahmagupta, as rife with possibility: an infinite space, rather than an empty one.

Text by Lindsey Lascaux

Echo Park Tree From Above
2023
Oil on linen
36" x 48"

Mom on Rainy Day in Edgemoor
2023
Oil on linen
36" x 30"

Chain Lakes Trail in Summer
2023
Oil on linen
36" x 48"

Self Portrait at Mammoth
2023
Oil on canvas
36" x 30"

Early Winter at Mt. Baker
2023
Oil on canvas
36" x 30"

Sequoia National Forest
Tree From Below
2023
Oil on linen
27" x 41"

David on Chain Lakes Trail
2023
Oil on canvas
36" x 30"

Late Summer at Mt. Baldy
2023
Oil on linen
36" x 30"