Jack Walls' ADA

 ADA is the title of a photograph Robert Mapplethorpe took of one of Jack Walls' friends. It is a striking portrait; beautiful, mysterious and unyielding.

Jack Walls remakes this single Mapplethorpe photograph into ninety-three ADA variations. Each collage is a beautiful composition on its own, but in the aggregate the collages have power as a meditation on how we look. The pieces are about altering perception using an existing artwork as a starting point.

These collages don't work through jarring juxtaposition but through repetition and variation. The same beige-colored newsprint peeking through, the same image, the same size. But in each one the photograph is reworked, reshaped, remade. The effect is complicated.

Walls' ADAs works in both ways: to enlarge, examine and reanimate the Mapplethorpe photograph and to use it as one element in wholly new art. The fascinating and complicated use of the image is magnified by Walls' intimacy with Mapplethorpe. In these works Walls acknowledges it, celebrates it and moves onto his own artistic space from it.

- Dana Spiotta
Softcover 9 x 12 in., 68 pages