Shane McAdams’ abstraction paintings are the product of a process that partially removes the artist’s hand from the work. The intricate network of branching, weblike forms take shape organically and develop within minutes once activated chemically. The complexity of the structures that emerge belie the relative simplicity of the act of creation. This is an intentional contradiction.

In creating a body of work such, the brunt of the workload comes far in advance of putting paint to panel. Assessing the material possibilities of the tools and media involved in the paintings is more important that the act of conception. McAdams has spent years trying to control the reaction that develops from a mixture of disparate, semi-resistant materials. In this regard, the work is as much about the conceptual instructions for the paintings as how that conspire to generate the object; it is as much about the recipe as the cake.

As well as trying to gain consistency in the basic physical process, McAdams works to introduce formal structures that subtly compete with the organic foundation of the work. For example, in this body of recent work, some paintings have directional marks created by rolled tennis balls and centralized compositions from being created upside down. The marks are designed to heighten the ambiguity between the natural and the synthetic and to ultimately call into question the artist’s relationship to the creative act.