Joël Brodovsky-Adams

Superhouse is pleased to present Like a Rumor, a solo exhibition by Joël Brodovsky-Adams. The exhibition brings together sculptural vessels and lighting that channel the energy of queer club culture into buoyant, gestural forms alive with the possibility of pleasure. Built entirely from wheel-thrown components and dressed in pattern, the works appear as both characters and elements of a scene: theatrical objects that seem to pose, gesture, or dance.

A new essay by Michael Bullock accompanies the exhibition.

Working from the potter's wheel, Brodovsky-Adams constructs each piece through an accumulation of thrown, altered, and assembled components. Vessel forms appear throughout the exhibition, sometimes retaining traces of utility and at other times moving into sculpture. The lighting challenges its own function, treating illumination and hardware as sculptural material. Rounded volumes swell, lean, and posture, as though caught in the act of becoming themselves. Animated by ambiguity, these ceramic bodies resist fixed identity, taking on a fluidity shaped by the codes, gestures, and intimacies of queer club culture.

Throughout the exhibition, ornament operates as surface, form, and attitude. Drawing from fashion, textile patterns, and decorative histories, Brodovsky-Adams treats adornment as a way of dressing the object. Pattern not only embellishes the work; it gives each form a charged presence, allowing it to appear self-aware and alive. The exhibition's title, Like a Rumor, borrows a phrase from José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia, where Muñoz proposes that queerness can be understood through fleeting signs that are felt before they can be proven: a gesture, pose, look, or trace of an encounter. In Brodovsky-Adams's ceramics, these passing signals are held in clay. A curve, handle, lip, or flourish becomes a means through which the object announces itself.

At the center of the exhibition is a sense of buoyancy. Brodovsky-Adams's works acknowledge the anxieties and uncertainties of lived experience but refuse to let them set the terms. Instead, they locate possibility in pleasure, beauty, and excess. Light becomes part of this language, extending each piece beyond its ceramic body and into the surrounding space.

Like a Rumor presents pleasure not as escape, but as an orienting force. Through vessels that seem to hold feeling and lamps that cast ornament into space, Brodovsky-Adams gives form to the possibility that beauty can sustain us, that joy can be rigorous, and that an object can hold the trace of a life still becoming.