Nenuphar
October 30, 2013 – January 11, 2014
SALON 94 BOWERY
243 Bowery
New York,
NY
SALON 94 FREEMAN
1 Freeman
Alley
New York,
NY
Salon 94
is delighted to present the work of Terry Adkins in both of the gallery’s
downtown locations. Adkins is an interdisciplinary artist and musician known
for engaging with historical narratives, often reinventing and reintroducing
biographies through installation based experiences called ”recitals”. His
approach to art making is similar to that of a composer, and his installations
are conceived as scores that punctuate and demarcate space, creating interplay
among pieces in different media.
For his
first New York gallery solo show in ten years, Adkins presents Nenuphar, a recital that treats the
legacies of George Washington Carver (1864-1943) and Yves Klein (1928-1962), focusing
on unfamiliar aspects of both men. On the surface, the biographies of Carver
and Klein could hardly be more different. Born a slave, American educator
Carver rose to such prominence as one of the world’s most revered agricultural
chemists and inventors that it has tended to overshadow his artistic advances.
He was an award winning painter, musician and creator of numerous pigments,
dyes and paints that were extracted from minerals in the soil of Tuskgegee,
Alabama. Notable among them is the 1935 Dr. Carver’s Egyptian Blue 9th
Oxidation, which matches an ancient hue found only on certain artifacts from
the tomb of Tutankhamen and approximates the color and pigment saturation
levels of International Klein Blue (IKB). French Nouveau Realist Yves Klein is
famous for his color experiments, monochromes, fire paintings, body works,
performances and revolutionary ideas and essays. Nonetheless, his early
influences from Eastern philosophical and religious doctrines, Japanese culture
and Rosicrucian esoterism - traditions that form the foundation of his
visionary project - are often downplayed or even denied in an effort to tout
his impervious originality. Many of Klein’s innovative concepts can be directly
traced to his study of The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception by Max Heindel and
Klein’s own Les Fondements du Judo (The Foundations of Judo) 1954, which bears
witness to the depth of his involvement with the Japanese belief systems on
body and space.
In Nenuphar, Adkins has drawn out and
illuminated these lesser-known Carver/Klein particulars, revealing surprising
similarities, intersections and common denominators. These include references
to botany, agriculture, nautica, religion, music and ancient Egypt that are
materially filtered through the sieve of the four elements (earth, fire, air,
water). In his sculpture, video and photography Adkins transforms and
repurposes a range of found materials, archival imagery and reclaimed actions
in a process that he calls “potential disclosure”. The artist aims to reveal the
dormant life in inanimate objects, historical facts and figures of thought with
the ultimate goal of rendering the material immaterial. For example, in
Harvest, irregular spheres of mirrored glass have been hand-blown through the
wire teeth of an apple picker—a found farm tool used as a readymade. The
gesture of breath into the mouth of the harvesting device instills the rugged
tool with handmade minimalist sculpture, and suggests a re-invention of the
tool as a collector of “air” and the immaterial. The sculpture also marries
Klein’s interests in the Void, the monochrome, minimalism and performance,
alongside Carver’s research and promotion of alternative crops to enrich the
soil and as a way for farmers to improve their quality of life outside the
monoculture of cotton. Modeled after illusory nature of Klein’s 1954 first
public gesture Peintures, the folio Progressive Nature Studies reimagines
Carver as the creator of a series of large monochrome paintings originating
from infinitesimal realm of organic phenomena that he observed through the lens
of his microscope. The video wall houses Glorioso, a dual screen 3D projection
of wreaths, crosses and floral arrangements that personify Carver, Klein and
acts of membership and memorialization.
The raw
and abstract sculptures incorporate found and fabricated materials in
idiosyncratic ways. Adkins is attracted to articles that are often weighty and
weathered—this includes utilitarian and industrial items like leather straps
and shipping ropes; historically evocative commodities like textiles and the
farm tools, customized musical instruments and equipment that hold the dynamic
potential for sound and rhythm. He employs reinvented narratives such as the
Carver/Klein story as a way to intensify the original functions of his
materials, as well as to disguise them entirely. Engaging in the history of
readymade from Marcel Duchamp to assemblage, Arte Povera and abject art, his
works suggest that reclaimed materials should be recreated. Texture, contrast,
tension, color and surface are all part of his theatrical considerations. In
the past, Adkins’ recitals have paid homage to the legacies of a number of
immortal and enigmatic figures such as Bessie Smith, W.E.B. Du Bois, John
Brown, Matthew Henson, John Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph
Ellison, Ludwig van Beethoven, Jean Toomer, and Sojourner Truth, among others.
Adkins’ immersive research not only intends to resuscitate his chosen subjects
from historical erasure, but also to shed light on willfully neglected or
lesser-known aspects of their biographies.
For
decades Adkins has been known for his modified instruments, including immense
eighteen-foot tall horns called Akrhaphones-installed as sculpture and
activated in front of an audience through performance. Born in 1953, Adkins
grew up deeply invested in visual art, music and language. He emerged in the
mid-80’s in his native Washington D.C., where he began making installations and
reconstructing instruments to accompany his simultaneous practice as a musician.
Playing woodwinds, contrabass, and electronics, Adkins started out as a charter
member of Harmolodica with fellow saxophonist Yahya Abdul-Majid, played in Don
Cherry’s Community Orchestra, and collaborated with performance artist Sherman
Fleming’s AFRO (Anti Formalist Reclamation Organization). During a yearlong
residency in Zurich in 1986, Adkins and his cohort Blanche Bruce founded The
Lone Wolf Recital Corps, a multimedia performance collaborative of rotating
members that continues to stage emblematic concert performances. Activating his
sculptures with sound, Adkins engages and re- enacts the revised stories he
assigns to history.
This is
the artist’s first exhibition at Salon 94. Adkins has exhibited his work widely
since his first show in 1980 in Washington, D.C. His work is included in the
public collections of The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington
D.C., The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Studio Museum in Harlem, The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Most recently, Adkins’ work Muffled Drums (Darkwater) was acquired by the Tate
Modern, made possible by the Outset/Frieze Art Fair Fund. In the spring of 2014
Prestel will publish Recital,
Adkins’s first career-spanning volume surveying three decades of his multimedia
installations and performances with contributions from Anthony Elms, Okwui
Enwezor, Cheryl Finley, Charles Gaines and George E. Lewis.
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