P·P·O·W is pleased to present Deity, Adam Putnam’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring an arrangement of sculptures and other improbable objects. Through an ongoing accumulation of imagery by means of photography, drawing, sculpture, film, installation, and performance, Putnam explores the shifting boundaries between architecture and nature, collective and individual experience, and the mundane and the transcendent.

For Putnam, meaningful connections exist in the space within and between, or as he puts it, “the format of the fragment.” These remnants, as opposed to being grouped in distinct bodies of work, are built up from one presentation to the next without end. Part of an ongoing mythology that has unfolded over the last three decades, Deity can be viewed as a sequel to Reclaimed empire, an ongoing film project that began in 2008. Here, video fragments of landscapes and broken architectural models are replaced with discarded tree branches — dead, orphaned, broken, and washed ashore along coastlines from around the world — that are subsequently carved into the forms of human limbs. Swept together, a salvaged empire transforms into a reclaimed body.

Unlike Putnam’s last solo exhibition, which featured a monumental tower, Deity invites viewers to look downward. Drawing on previous architectural visualizations, a mysterious octagonal reservoir of water sits at the center of a hexagonal tile floor made from earth surrounding the artist’s Maine studio. Referencing ancient Greek oracles, the water’s reflection projects enigmatic, vibrational imagery transmitted by the movement of people in the room, the building, and the city itself. Along with newly printed photographs and other small-scale structures, the fragments brought together in Deity act as a map, a snippet of a dream, and a glimpse into another reality.