Art Installations

Terry Adkins: Sanctuary

Sanctuary is a meditation on the abolitionist John Brown (1800-1859) and the forty days and nights he spent in a Virginia prison cell before being publicly hanged for treason on December 2, 1859. John Brown transformed the dire circumstances of his incarceration into a monastic experience wherein he contemplated on the impact of his single-minded purpose of eradicating the institution of slavery in America. I have intended to make Cellblock 2 reflect this transformation by embellishing its vaulted hall into a ritualistic cathedral space and its cells into chambers of epic, meditative monastic space which sequentially illuminate aspects of John Brown as prophet, martyr, soldier and shepherd. Sanctuary is also a commentary on the legacy of John Brown - the high percentage of African Americans who are incarcerated today reveal the prison system to be a contemporary plantation and its inhabitants as the chattel of latter-day slavery.

TERRY ADKINS

Terry Adkins' work bridges past and present in astonishing ways. For more than two decades he has forged a rich and complex project of examining historically resonant sites, salvaging cast-off materials, and transforming them into elegant, eloquent sculptures and installations that commemorate particular places and people at their source. Artist, musician, teacher, scholar, Adkins generates a multi-dimensional, exquisitely subtle response grounded in specific artifacts but expressive of universal truths. As the blues strips music to its bare essentials—every note meant to be felt, every feeling capable of stretching from debasement to transcendence—so too do Adkins’ works reveal both the essence of their material substance and a full range of poetic associations. Seen in juxtaposition, the works resonate musically: the squeal of barely recognizable objects put to new and unexpected use; the swell of form and mass rising and spreading in response to architecture; the buzz of disparate elements syncopated by palette and surface tensions. But when the intellectual/emotional/spiritual scope of a situation warrants it, Adkins conceives the presentation not as an exhibition of visual art alone, but as a “recital” in compound dimensions: artworks reverberating in space, bound together by a transparent net of past and present tense—phantoms free-associating—with related musical, textual, and movement-based performance that extends visual awareness into other realms. A cacophony of sensory input, a careening shift from then to now, a multiplicity of bold and persuasive voices emanating from the heady mix.

Adkins' artistic process is intuitive, empathetic, rigorous, integrative, and informed by a truly expansive knowledge of history. Employing the standard principles of minimalism—reducing forms to their basic constituent parts, elaborating through replication, responding with simplicity and clarity to the conditions of presentation—he deftly transfigures neglected artifacts, denying them nostalgia or sentimentality yet still maintaining their potential for poetic correlation. By under-playing rather than depending on the subject of the work, he allows viewers to construct their own layered readings. Just as music is sent out and listeners make of it what they will, this artist/musician trusts that the meaning of a work of art is variable, often complicated, and that viewers have to craft it for themselves. Few others whose works address the implications of social injustice have exercised such subtlety and restraint.”

Annette DiMeo Carlozzi 2003
Curator of Contemporay Art
Jack Blanton Museum of Art
Austin, Texas