Bold As Love

Priska C. Juschka Fine Art is pleased to present Bold as Love, Adam Parker Smith’s first solo exhibition in New York City. Created as an illustrative tableau to disseminate Smith’s ongoing explorations involving consumerist addiction to violence and the infatuation with the high school crush, Bold as Love combines craftwork and portraiture in order to present the aftermath of an imagined scene inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls. Hemingway’s highly criticized novel incorporated actual events that occurred during the Spanish Civil War with a romantic love affair. The horrific executions of fascists in the town of Ronda in 1936 was fictionalized by the author into the novel’s pivotal scene where accused fascists were rounded up, held captive in a small church, made to run a gauntlet of townspeople who brutalized them with every possible tool and finally, forced towards a cliff to fall to their deaths. The debauchery of war and the decline of human rationality was Hemingway’s message to an American society that was witnessing an increase of violence on many fronts. Smith creates a contemporary parallel as well as a parable gleaned from present-day media. Each of the seventy heads on pikes is an individual portrait of society’s members. From celebrities, like Mike Tyson, Anna Nicole Smith and John F. Kennedy, to personal friends of Smith’s and the young artists he works with, the message is that sensationalized death by any means gains the attention of the public.