COVER STORY

See Me After Class

Artist Adam Greener generates nostalgia for the awkward heyday of middle school

From Sept. 14 to Oct. 12, artist Adam Greener’s work will be featured in “See Me After Class: A Spiral Bound Journey by Adam Greener” at Art Unified, a new gallery in Venice.

By Bridgette Redman

Few people talk about their middle school days with fondness, but that could change if they visit Adam Greener’s exhibition at the new Art Unified gallery in Venice. With his oversized spiralbound paper art, Greener engenders a nostalgia for those days when teachers squashed creative detours from assigned work and detentions filled with line writing were all too common. Fifteen of his works are featured in an ongoing series from Sept. 14 to Oct. 12 in a show called, “See Me After Class: A Spiral Bound Journey by Adam Greener.” Greener has been developing the series since the early 2000s and he said there is no end in sight as he has a wealth of ideas he wants to explore and play with. The first work in the series is one that is still in his collection and was inspired by an elementary school task. “The assignment was for the students to draw pictures that expressed why drugs are bad,” Greener said. “I remember just falling in love with this. It was some of my earliest memories of, ‘Wow, I can express myself not in words, which I’m not great at necessarily, but in imagery.’” He recreated that assignment, albeit on a much larger scale and with his adult skills and perspective. A cartoon-like body built from sad muscles and weeping bones all react to the destructive path of illicit drugs. Along the top, he titled the piece, “Don’t Like Drugs.” “I love that it is specific to an actual assignment that I remember doing when I was young,” Greener said. Other paintings in the series include book reports about presidents and their sex parties, math story problems with smart-aleck answers, and lots of written lines with evidence that he is doing the opposite of what the writing lesson is trying to teach such as “I will not bring matches to class” on a paper that is partly burned away or “I will not bring scissors to class” with the word “boobies” cut out of the middle. Invariably, assignments have “You are better than this” or “See me after class” scrawled across the top. The works invoke smiles, but they also remind people of how tough growing up could be. For Greener, his spiral notebook was his sanctuary. “I always struggled with authority and focus; following the rules, doing what I was told, coloring inside the lines, literally and figuratively,” Greener said. “Amid a swirl of hormones, pressures to fit in, and a veritable lack of control over most aspects of my life (including my parents’ divorce), I — like a lot of kids, I think — felt isolated. My sticker-and-scribble-adorned notebook was a private place — a personal retreat where I could color outside the lines without recrimination, control everything, and be the undisputed master of my own pre-pubescent domain.” While inspired by school-age memories, the work is both fun and challenging for Greener. While the works are intended to look like they are 8 1/2- by 11-sheets of paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook, they are actually 32 by 40 inches, a size intended to tower over the viewers. Greener said people express surprise upon learning that he creates each of the sheets. “When people stand in front of it, they are often confused,” Greener said. “They’re like, ‘Wait, where did you get this giant sheet of notebook paper?’ It shifts their whole reality, which I love. And I love to explain how I do it.” He makes the paper out of two-ply museum board and draws the lines himself. He carves the perforations and holes on the paper by hand in the exact proportions of an 8 1/2- by 11-sheet, but on a 32- by 40-inch board. It’s one reason that his work is more effective in person than on a website or in a photo. It would be easy to look at it and think that the work was a standard size sheet of paper. It’s only when you zoom out or have a person in the photo that you get the context for its size and have a different experience with the work. The decision to make them so large evolved through the

years. He started out working on a smaller scale, but eventually enlarged them in the later 2000s to the size they are now. “The size works best for the stories I’m trying to tell,” Greener said. “By blowing them up, you’re heightening the irony, you’re juxtaposing the childish naivete with the weighty, heighted emotion and the drama of what it is to be a grown up.” He said he wants to make it as authentic as possible to the viewers’ memories of being in class with their little desk and drawing in a notebook. He points out that when you’re a kid, everything seems really big. He hopes that his work restores to adults the feeling of what it is like to look down at your desk and see that sheet of paper. It felt much bigger as a child than it does to adults now and he wants viewers to remember that perspective. Much of the work is autobiographical, Greener said, and he pulls from imagery and the iconography of being a middle schooler in the early to mid80s. He believes, though, that the imagery is timeless, that it transcends decades by introducing the feel of nostalgia and the part these pictures played in everyone’s lives. “I pull from my own years of being in middle school and what my favorite movies or cartoon characters are,” Greener said. “I love to share my work because of how universal it is. It triggers all these great memories in the viewers.” Greener’s practice began as small-scale drawing and doodling. He loved children’s art and was passionate about creating it in the late 90s. “I’d been doing them for eight or nine years just because I had such a passion for it,” Greener said. “My friends and family would give them out as gifts.” They were always telling him that he should be selling his art. One day, an artist friend of his told Greener about a monthly group exhibition that combined music, food, multimedia and art. He was shy about showing his stuff on that kind of a stage, but his friend talked him into it. “It was a surreal experience to be stepping back and seeing six of my pieces being shown for the first time publicly, and a crowd forming around it laughing and pulling their friends into it,” Greener said. “They were sharing the stories I was telling.” He was surprised to see so many people connecting with his work. At the end of the night, all his pieces had sold and he won “Best in Show.” Thus launched the series and his career as a fine artist. Greener’s exhibition is the first to be shown at Art United, a gallery owned by Johan Andersson, a portrait painter who runs a collective with other artists that Greener is a part of. “He’s curated so effectively artists who all share in the same ethos, the same playfulness, pulling on nostalgia strings, unexpected pop culture,” Greener said. “When you walk into his gallery, you get the sense of a shared collective theme that really just feels like the perfect place to be a part of.” He explains that the gallery is a throwback to when Venice was the place for up-and-coming artists. Greener invites people to experience his work and to hearken back to a simpler time in their lives, a time of adolescence where their world was so small, but yet so big. He wants them to connect back to their own childhood when they experience his work. “(I hope) they laugh and that they’re transported back in time to their younger selves,” Greener said. “And kids can enjoy it as much as adults can. Even though they don’t have the lens of looking back, but there is something that is true today.” On Sept. 14 from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., the public is invited to come play with his work at the official opening. Nostalgia will rule not only in his works on the wall, but with the presence of an ice cream truck, spiked drinks, nostalgic candy and refreshments. Consider an invitation to re-experience the delightful parts of middle school.

“See Me After School” by Adam Greener

WHEN: Wednesday, Sept. 14, to Wednesday, Oct. 12, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. WHERE: Art Unified, 1329 Abbot Kinney Boulevard, Venice INFO: artunified.com, adamgreener.com