Beautiful Plastic

Courtesy of PDX Contemporary Art

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Cornish Main Gallery, Main Campus Center, 1000 Lenora St., first floor, 726-5011, www.cornish.edu. Free. Tues.–Fri. Ends Oct. 17.

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• Beautiful Plastic
  October 8, 2008

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• Brad Adkins

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One of the most striking pieces in "Gimme: From Inspiration to Appropriation," an exhibit curated by Suzanne Beal at Cornish, is a plastic water bottle. The bottle looks crystalline, almost as though the plastic had been heated, melted, and allowed to bubble and cool, forming delicate, evenly spaced, perfectly circular pockets of air. But Brad Adkins' Plastic Water Bottle is far simpler: a water bottle drilled through, over and over, with a Dremel tool. With a diameter designed to fit in your hand—and you'll want to touch it—the drinking cylinder has become a sculpture composed of tiny holes, all the size of a thumbtack's tip. The 12-ounce beverage container has been so thoroughly perforated that the surface is more air than solid. A delicate lace is formed by the negative space. Additionally, the material seems to have mutated in the making: No longer pliable and transparent, the bottle has become brittle under the stress of repeated hole-punching. In this transformation, a common disposable object has been made into a carefully rendered sculpture, something permanent, possessing intention, pattern, and beauty.