The principal of juxtaposition is critical in much of Adkins’s oeuvre, particularly in the video work Flumen Orationis (2012, fig. 27). Here Adkins combines stereoscopic images of early flight and World War I with audio from Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun” (Band of Gypsies, 1970) and Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam” (1967). This work, part of the recital The Principalities, After Jimi Hendrix was inspired, in part, by Hendrix’s brief time as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division in 1961. Adkins wrote of Hendrix’s influence:

 

Machine Gun, Hendrix’s unflinchingly brave rallying cry, valiantly proclaims that war is murder—that only love and the power of soul can bring about a peaceful end to the carnage for profit that was wrought in Vietnam then as it has been elsewhere with unbridled frenzy ever since.14

 

The flickering video, alternating between two stereoscopic images, creates a visual energy that speaks to the auditory experience. This work and Julianne Swartz’s Transfer (objects) are the only two in the exhibition that use legible outside texts. Here, sound merges with music and the visual, and in Swartz’s piece with the tactile, eroding the straightforward legibility of the spoken word into something richer, denser, and more affective.