Get Weird is honored to present an evening of new compositions by acclaimed visual artists and gifted improvisers Charles Gaines and Terry Adkins. Led by Adkins, the Lone Wolf Recital Corps will be performing Invocation for Bessie Smith, an exploration of shared space and emotional depth. This large ensemble brings together the talents of Arthur Flowers, Joie Lee, James Andrew Brown, Charles Gaines, Terry Adkins, Juini Booth, Blanche Bruce, Jacolby Satterwhite, and The Sacred Order of the Twilight Brothers. Charles Gaines, Juini Booth, and Terry Adkins will reconvene as ACTG Solar Trio to perform Freedom Suite, a relentless and soulful piece built from subtle delicacies and passionate fireworks.
Terry Adkins is an installation artist, musician, activist, and cultural practitioner who for twenty years has pursued an ongoing quest to reinsert historically transformative figures to their rightful place in the landscape of regional and world history. Although his “recitals” combine sculpturally based installations with music, video, literature, and ritual actions that intend to uphold and preserve the legacies of his chosen subjects, Adkins’s work is always abstract and lyrical. His Lone Wolf Recital Corps is a unit with revolving membership that has premiered works at ICA London, Rote Fabrik, Zurich, New World Symphony, Miami, P.S.1 MOMA,s and ICA Philadelphia among others.
Since 1995 Charles Gaines has focused on the postmodern sublime and metonymy to make art that combines drawn or photographic images with text. Drawing from an array of literary sources, especially arguments challenging conventional ideas about meaning in art and its relationship to aesthetic experience, he made these ideas the basis of his work. His art began to address the irreconcilable opposition, in classical theory, between the conditions of feelings (beauty) and the conditions of culture (sublimity), which negate each other in the same experience. Gaines also has a parallel career as a drummer, accomplished pianist, and composer.