Monster heads set their gaze upon Broadway

Photo by Larry A Rosen

Since 1984, New York University’s Broadway Windows have provided passersby with a host of images and scenes for their inspection, but never before has the art to be found there been so expressive of darkness, yet whimsical in its approach. With Bold As Love, the artist, Adam Parker Smith brings together the grotesque and the absurd, the monstrous and the laughable. And we come away feeling reawakened and strangely refreshed.

 

Through his felt sculptures of decapitated monster heads, Smith helps us to recognize both the fears that drive us, and absurdity of those fears. As our parent’s told us time and again as we were growing up, “it was only a nightmare, honey; go back to sleep,” Smith takes a similar approach with his installation. Ultimately, nightmare images are nothing more than nightmares, cartoons to be noticed—the decapitated heads are eerily lit and the backdrops splattered with what appears to be fresh blood—pondered for a moment or two, and finally recognized for their absurdity. When we come to that recognition, that Smith’s monsters are not real, then the darkness they refer to, the evil which they imply, and finally our fears themselves, lose their potency.