Wayne Adams

"This exhibit is a two-person collaboration between Brent Everett Dickinson and Wayne Adams that considers both visible and non-visible elements: Adams’ visual artifacts and Dickinson’s invisible but omnipresent voice-based sound piece (which works to organize the viewer’s experience of the visible elements, alternately supporting and unsettling the gallery experience through both responsible and irresponsible interpretive framing). It is the vacillation between supporting and unsettling, coupled with the complex meanings embedded in the work itself, which creates beautiful feedback and failure, posing as many questions as answers. Of course the final, necessary component of this division of labor is the viewer’s own engagement with these complicated transactions, adding meaning to the exhibition by the very presence of their body and mind, displacing and organizing the works as they move through the space.

"The title relates to I Corinthians 14, in which the Apostle Paul mandates the necessary context for Godly “tongues”—the inclusion of an inspired interpreter. The use of this concept provocatively draws a correlation between the coding that goes on in all art work, richly exemplified by Adams' works, and the spiritually-inspired coding represented in the biblical account of speaking in tongues. Though there are obvious categorical differences between these, in both cases crude materials (i.e. paint in the one case and, in the other, sound pushed through the larynx of a prophet) are coaxed into sublime communication through the role of interpretation."

—Bruce Herman, Gallery Director