American Pastoral
Taking its title from Philip Roth’s novel, American Pastoral examines the instability beneath the reassuring surface of American life. Familiar settings accommodate troubling conditions: exploitation, surveillance, environmental damage, and the threat of violence. Their ordinary appearance is deliberate. It asks how harm becomes accepted as part of everyday life.
These images are AI-constructed fictions that use the visual language of photography. They do not document specific events or locations. Instead, they describe recurring conditions across the American landscape, from pipelines and detention infrastructure to commercial interiors and family homes.
These are fictions, but they are not lies.
-Mac Adams
Born in Wales, and based in the United States, Adams has presented more than 100 solo exhibitions. His international exhibition history includes documenta 6 in Kassel; Mudam Luxembourg; the Museum Oscar Niemeyer in Curitiba, Brazil; MOCAK in Kraków; and exhibitions at gb agency in Paris and Sfeir-Semler in Hamburg. His work was also presented at Art Basel Unlimited in 2017.
Adams’s work is held in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Mudam Luxembourg; and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. His public commissions include the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Battery Park, New York. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at SUNY Old Westbury.