Forst Mosaic, 1997

Adkins’s Forst Mosaic (1997) produces a warmly textured sun or planet-like image from thousands of aged, paper labels originally intended for packages of meat (Forst was a prominent mid-century meat-packing company inNew York). The easy slippage of the work’s title (“forced” for “Forst”), conjoined with a common metaphor for multi- culturalism, pulls Adkins’s material manipulations into a zone of uneasy political commentary.