My work contorts our understanding of human sexuality beyond the limitations of the human form. In rendering a space between cartooning, eroticism and abstraction, I challenge depictions of queerness within an anthropomorphic worldview. Forms and colors pulsate with exaggerated gesture, seducing the viewer into an underbelly of dark humor. Bulbous shapes stretch like a warm taffy pull while candy-like colors appear fresh and hot from the oven. The works glow with an emanating heat, slowly cooling as they slither into our subconscious. The drawings possess a variety of coexisting contradictions; what appears smooth is rough, rigid turns to uncooked dough and the inanimate becomes overly animate. Figures and spaces are “queer” in that they exist somewhere before immediate recognition as they deceive conventional logic. The viewer finds themselves in a space between identification and uncertainty while the images giggle in their presence.

My process engages on both a material and surface level. Working on cold press watercolor paper, I penetrate the substrate itself with washes in watercolor and acrylic gouache. On top I layer with crayons and pencils, allowing color to accumulate as material on the surface. Composed of a close and intimate rendering technique and looser, wet-on-wet painting, this in-between process mirrors the hybridized subjects within my compositions. The coarse paper allows the images to retain a toothy, grainy texture that contrasts their more sinuous and curved forms. I use artificially vibrant colors inspired by the devious cartoons I watched in the early 90s and 2000s. These hues radiate with a half-life, stained into the fibers of the paper and the memory of the audience. Often queer coded or non-human centered, these narratives defied heterocentric perspectives and delivered radical alternative truths to closeted youth like myself. These visual and conceptual links merge together in my work as an uncanny displays of power, representation and seduction.
 
Adam Linn (b. 1995 Pittsburgh, PA) is an artist working across drawing, painting and printmaking based in Mount Vernon, NY. Linn received a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 and recently his MFA in Visual Arts from Purchase College, SUNY in 2024.

My work contorts our understanding of human sexuality beyond the limitations of the human form. In rendering a space between cartooning, eroticism and abstraction, I challenge depictions of queerness within an anthropomorphic worldview. Forms and colors pulsate with exaggerated gesture, seducing the viewer into an underbelly of dark humor. Bulbous shapes stretch like a warm taffy pull while candy-like colors appear fresh and hot from the oven. The works glow with an emanating heat, slowly cooling as they slither into our subconscious. The drawings possess a variety of coexisting contradictions; what appears smooth is rough, rigid turns to uncooked dough and the inanimate becomes overly animate. Figures and spaces are “queer” in that they exist somewhere before immediate recognition as they deceive conventional logic. The viewer finds themselves in a space between identification and uncertainty while the images giggle in their presence.

My process engages on both a material and surface level. Working on cold press watercolor paper, I penetrate the substrate itself with washes in watercolor and acrylic gouache. On top I layer with crayons and pencils, allowing color to accumulate as material on the surface. Composed of a close and intimate rendering technique and looser, wet-on-wet painting, this in-between process mirrors the hybridized subjects within my compositions. The coarse paper allows the images to retain a toothy, grainy texture that contrasts their more sinuous and curved forms. I use artificially vibrant colors inspired by the devious cartoons I watched in the early 90s and 2000s. These hues radiate with a half-life, stained into the fibers of the paper and the memory of the audience. Often queer coded or non-human centered, these narratives defied heterocentric perspectives and delivered radical alternative truths to closeted youth like myself. These visual and conceptual links merge together in my work as an uncanny displays of power, representation and seduction.
 
Adam Linn (b. 1995 Pittsburgh, PA) is an artist working across drawing, painting and printmaking based in Mount Vernon, NY. Linn received a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 and recently his MFA in Visual Arts from Purchase College, SUNY in 2024.