The Washington artist is inspired by the James Bond author
Now Northeast artist Peter McAdam has used the name for a new multimedia exhibition that opened at Arts Center Washington (ACW).
“Fleming used his Trout Memo to focus thoughts, ideas and dreams. I did the same for this exhibition,” said Mr. McAdam, also known as McDada.
Mr McAdam said his exhibition includes six different sections, including one called “Lockdown Blues”.
“During lockdown we were living in a twilight zone and I wanted to reflect the other worldliness of that time,” he said.
“I photographed local places like cemeteries and photoshopped a cartoon character I call MM – she may look familiar.”
Technology plays a central role in the exhibition – for a section called Trip Pop, Mr McAdam used an app he developed called iCoda.
The app uses music to randomly generate images on a screen, which Mr. McAdam then overlays into compositions by adding a Liquify brush to create swirls, creating colorful, psychedelic images.
“The work is inspired by experimental filmmakers of the 1960s,” he said.
Technology is also used in another part of the exhibition called “End of Time.”
“In this section I used AI as a starting point, using words fed into an AI engine to trigger a huge range of images. “The words could have come from a dream or a thought,” Mr. McAdam said.
“I took the pictures and ‘edited’ them using Photoshop. The images produced were like a collection of dreams from a diary, with AI speeding up the process.”
Another section of Trout Memo is called Henryville. Mr McAdam said: “There are nine cloned Henrys living in Henryville. The Henrys live in a surrealistic world, people like Ingrid the cauliflower and Macbeth the housefly.”
Epitaph is another part of the exhibition. This artwork is inspired by his friends and family and features images of his younger self as well as family members.
Mr McAdam held a variety of jobs – including as a community gardener, painter/decorator and salesman – before completing a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Sunderland in 1987 and then an MA in the same subject at the same university in 2003.
Since then he has exhibited, curated and produced numerous artworks, events and exhibitions in the North East and beyond.
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In 2020, Peter curated 15 artists to exhibit their work in 86 bus stops across Durham County during lockdown. Some of these posters can be seen in the Trout Memo exhibition.
The artwork in the Trout Memo exhibition at ACW can be found in Mr McAdam’s new 234-page full-color anthology, Trout Memo Volume 2, available now on Amazon.
Trout Memo can be found in ACW’s main gallery until Friday, November 4th.
