Volume 15 Issue 1 » 91
C U STO M WO R K
Kitbashing
W I T H K I M ADAM S
by Will Fong
»
Kim Adams has established
himself as one of Canada’s
leading contemporary
sculptors. He works in
miniature and large-scale
forms, creating new worlds
and new objects through
kitbashing. He often explores
the interplay between reality
and the absurd; all with social
meaning and all through the
use of everday and repurposed
objects such as the many
cars that he chops and cross
breeds.
From the 1/24 scale plastic Beetle (2002)
to Artist’s Colony (2012) and its intensely
populated and dense miniature world, to
Don’t Look Back (2007) that spans 100’
across drywall, there are few boundaries
for Adams. Certainly none in one of his
defining pieces, the Bruegel-Bosch Bus at the
Art Gallery of Hamilton. The installation
has been ongoing since 1997. “It’s more
like I feed that piece in Hamilton,” says
Adams. He feeds his bus and expands the
installation as often as he can every year, a
sort of lifelong love affair that has no limits.
Asked when he’ll stop, he simply laughs,
“When I die.”
Bruegel-Bosch Bus, 1997 - ongoing
Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid
It’s tempting to look at the Bruegel-Bosch
Bus as Adams’ defining masterpiece: a work
in process at twenty years and counting, the
kitbashed models and dioramas, the duality
of reality and unreality unfolding around
the split-window 1960 Volkswagen van.
Half of his years as a sculptor are on full
display here, a kind of artist in residence
opportunity where he reveals a neverending
phantasmagoria, giving us that rarest of
real-time insights into his split-window
mind.