John Adkins Exhibition - Kendall Art Gallery Miami

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on January 28, 2015 at 3:11pm

Curator’s Comments:

(disclaimer: John is a very good friend & I have admired his work for many years.)

I was looking through these installation shots of your work recently, and I’m held by this piece that appears to be a construction of eight hinged paintings on panels.  As objects they read as opened books.  But unlike many of your obsessively worked surfaces, the exteriors provide a quiet counterbalance in texture and color. Their “backs” face the viewer, drawing us into a protected or coveted enclave of energized space.  The panels appear to be in dialogue with each other, but together construct a larger narrative unit.  The small dots repeated in the interior remind me of sequins, or jeweled decoration, but carried through to the black side they call to mind a targeted point or geographic destination.  The collaged inclusions from air mailers, stamps and emblematic natural elements provide alternate locus of operation, transmuting distance through mathematics or even genetic pairing. The duality of the sides and opposition in installation sets up a dynamic and potentially adversarial relationship. But the intimacy is maintained by their scale and arrangement.