A wooden box sheathed with bands of oxidized copper and topped with brass and stretched rawhide, Dark Night evokes the form of a drum. The work is part of a series of sculptures Adkins began in 1986 while at an artist residency in Zurich, during which he founded the Lone Wolf Recital Corps. These sculptures anticipated Adkins’s later installations incorporating the display and performance of variously manipulated or invented instruments and musical machines. “Embedded in the sculpture is the trace of sound, the trace of the nature of sound, even if the sculptures aren’t sounding,” Adkins said of these works.
Gallery label from Projects 107: Lone Wolf Recital Corps, August 19-October 9, 2017.