Lately, Turiya Adkins flirted with emptiness — emptiness as in total aesthetic freefall, as in pleading of the fifth, as in total loss of plot, as in total refusal to be narrowly understood. The void as in pure abstraction.
When he was 11, the artist’s science teacher showed his class a video of Olympian Mike Powell cascading through the sky as he broke the world long jump record. His teacher’s intention was to demonstrate the concept of speed, but what he failed to mention, and what Adkins internalized from that lesson, was that black people have long defied gravity, that our existence has long depended on our strange ability to fly. During a conversation, Adkins noted, “It was the first time I had experienced this kind of record quality, in which Powell not only beat everyone, but also himself. I knew what I was seeing was the most literal reflection of black triumph. Where Powell used his musculoskeletal ability to step up, Adkins took a brush.
Drawing on the legacy of black track and field athletes, the history of the Great Migration, and contemporary examples of black fugitiveness (concerted acts of literal or metaphorical escape that challenge normative notions of power, property, and citizenship), Adkins engages in illuminating the poetic nature of black subjects in motion. Until recently, his paintings featured refracted images of black runners amid sprawling gestural compositions. Drawing her eyes to the upper left corner of her studio, she lyrically reflected on how the presence of the physical body offers her audience a visual anchor. Lately, however, she has become suspicious of her compulsion to make forms recognizable and is increasingly interested in a mode of pure abstraction that puts her audience on a perceptive back foot.
“Pure abstraction allows an open mode of interpretation. This takes you down a more spiral path and it is not guaranteed that where you end up is the same as where other viewers end up. Likewise, you can watch it for a week, come back to work at another time and come away with a renewed interpretation. So abstraction lends itself to a more amorphous medium of understanding,” she told me. In other words, she became invested in using the absence of physical form to inspire limitless speculation on behalf of the viewer. By denying viewers a body on which to “land” their eyes, Adkins adopts a more disobedient flight path – one that eschews the comfort of easy acting and, instead, embraces an ecstatic sense of suspension.
As is the case with any aesthetic and conceptual departure, his new way of working reflects a series of internal revolutions, chained together through the process of learning to trust unequivocally one’s own hand and, moreover, to find the gratification in shameless pictorial confidence – which could also be described as a willingness to refuse the project of “giving meaning”. To that end, she notes, “Letting go of that sense of familiarity in a figurative image allowed me to rely more on my brand as a language. Undoubtedly, Adkins has developed an unshakeable faith that the visual chorus gushing from his hands will manifest in an image that, even in the absence of a physical body, approximates what one feels when, like Powell did, take flight. Ultimately, her work is an invitation to inhabit the ether and embody indeterminacy as Darkness itself.
