Adams and Ollman is pleased to present A Future Life, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Jonathan Berger. The exhibition will open on February 12 and be on view through March 12. This is the artist’s first exhibition in Portland, Oregon.

For A Future Life, Berger has created an installation comprised of a handmade floor and stage-like plinths, all of which have been constructed from thousands of small charcoal blocks. This imperfect gridded surface holds both the viewer and a series of elaborately crafted small-scale sculptural objects made from a restricted palette of what the artist refers to as elementary materials, which he identifies as tin, putty, charcoal, and chalk.

Central to the exhibition is a small model depicting a century plant, a flowering agave with roughly the same lifespan as a person, which dies after its first and only bloom. Berger’s rendition is made from a no longer produced tin material that he salvages whose silver surface appears, in turns, mirrored, dull, and corroded. In another untitled work, also made from the same material, the sharp points of two hearts orbit each other so closely that they nearly touch. In a third work, Berger has constructed a large globe from putty that appears impossibly round for its size and the apparent imperfect nature of the material from which it is made. Its dark grey surface, both polished and scratched, obscures any understanding of the object’s true weight, material, or content. 

The objects in Berger’s set-like, nearly monochromatic exhibition appear simultaneously common and mysterious and the materials from which they are made are both recognizable, yet inaccessible or out of time--almost a caricature of themselves. Each isolated on its own plinth, the sculptures in the exhibition can be understood in terms of portraiture. The relationships that they form to one another and the viewer yield an implied narrative structure, which hints at something fundamental to human experience.

While Berger's connection to the individual works in the show remains personal and specific, their emotional weight and the evocative nature of the materials, as well as the accessibility afforded by his use of archetypal forms, gives the total work the feeling of a pop song--stylized, lyrical and open. The exhibition then becomes a structure into which one can project his/her own experience.

This exhibition marks Berger’s return to the construction of objects after a nearly eight-year hiatus, during which time he pursued projects which approached portraiture through making exhibitions that functioned as experimental biographies of various historical figures. Berger is best known for his six-year investigative portrait of entertainer Andy Kaufman, which resulted in three exhibitions that used abstract configurations of primary information, in the form of ephemera and testimony, to create a portrayal of Kaufman which was simultaneously accurate and inconclusive.