For his 2014 Artpace residency exhibition, "Weight of Culture," Adam Helms created image-based pieces—photogravures—that are inspired from an art historian named Aby Warburg (1886-1929), who devised a view of art history based in displaying images of repeating themes he saw in the work of Antiquity and The Renaissance. The cultural materials Helm draws from are broad and from a variety of time periods. He is interested in how the viewer will be inclined to draw narratives within each of my own pathos fields. There are no specific narratives he is seeking to create, only the impulse of the viewer to possibly seek one for themselves. In this way each image, or series of images, can carry a certain ‘weight’ to the relationship the viewer brings to the gallery. The images come from an archive of images that is continually expanding. They are found on the internet, from film stills, scans, and found materials. Most of them—and many that comprise the body of work created at Artpace—are from films book materials that have significance for the artist.
