The Targets of Marc Adornato

THE TARGETS OF MARC ADORNATO

Ottawa rouser Marc Adornato stirs the public imagination with images of gas masks and hazmats, saints, a burning bank, and oil spills. 

Talking and walking with masks on through his homemade gallery of this and that, Adornato offers the fascinating backstories to his artwork adorning nearly every piece of wall in each room. His travels, his experiments, paintings, statues and plants, there’s so much to explore.  

Aside from the guided tour, I came here today on this summer afternoon of pandemic 2020, because I want to know more about the politics of Ottawa’s infamous boat rocker. Adornato does not see himself as an activist, likening himself to a filmmaker documenting protest movements. “I’ve never been comfortable with being classified as an activist, but I don’t mind the idea of agitation. I’m just an artist, I went to school for art, I make art and I think that the role of art is to reflect what’s happening in the world, gauging and watching and taking the temperature of what’s happening.”

While Adornato is not an activist, his work is provocative, eerie and thoughtful in its themes and subjects. The penchant for parody and satire seems to clash perfectly with the charming characters and landscapes he’s worked with. “I think art kind of allows me to get away with shit that wouldn’t necessarily be able to get away with in the real world. If I paint a guy burning down a bank, it’s not me burning down the bank, I haven’t even touched the property of the bank.” 

Marc was generous to offer a guided chronology of political subjects in his work over the years. Early on, the brute aggression of capitalism is expressed with topics of war and oil. Along the way, he’s explored major shifts from climate change and the social assault of terror. More recently, if you’ve followed his IG, you've witnessed the artist’s exploration of technology (space, human genome, cures, internet) and religion.

It’s no surprise that someone inciting such thought crimes would have at least a file with Big Brother. In an Access To Information and Privacy Request, the artist said to the RCMP, “I want everything you’ve got on Marc Adornato.”

In response to the request, the RCMP provided, “a seven-page mostly redacted document” only willing to share that they view him as an eccentric artist. 

Screenshot of Adornato's Instagram

INTERPOL will likely know Adornato by name soon too as his work has been showing up in Naples, Italy. This brings up for the artist a new topic, of stencils and wheat pasting, and his excitement beams. 

“Flour, water and sugar boiled on the stove...we’re talking pennies per splatter. I’ve just been having fun sticking it. It’s a new thing for me, cool to branch out and get into that community.”

Just before Covid, with his partner, Adornato was traveling in Europe for two months on what they were calling The End of the World Tour. “I didn’t fucking realize that was really going to be the end of the world tour!” 

Highlights of the trip besides Copenhagen and two weeks in Greece were Berlin and a month in Italy. It was the first time seeing everything in Italy, the classics, but he started noticing works by Blub, adding a snorkel and bubbles to famous paintings in Florence, Rome, Pizza and Naples. “Six-foot wheat pastes'', the artist exclaims. 

He says Berlin was mind-blowing: tags were so prominent that every wall looked Pollock-like. There were free street art tours and it was celebrated, restaurants were asking artists to paint and tag on their walls. “It just blew my mind. I came back to Ottawa after this trip and I said, ‘this is something I’ve got to do.’”

After meeting the person who runs the Wheat Paste Museum in Naples, they already knew each other on IG, he has since sent them some of his work which is now posted all over Naples and in the museum. 

In closing, I wanted to inquire if Marc had any vision for a preferred future society. His response?  “We just need to look Star Trek and Captain Jean Luc Piccard. I can't wait until we get with the program.” 

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*All artwork by March Adornato, screencaps from IG, or photographed in person.