Formed entirely of aluminium clothes hangers, Matchbook Blue is among a group of works that Adkins created from cast-off materials he encountered during a residency at a former uniform manufacturing factory in San Antonio, Texas. The work was first exhibited as part of the recital Towering Steep at Dartmouth College’s Jaffe-Friede & Strauss Galleries, New Hampshire. This assemblage work exemplifies both Adkins’s engagement with found objects and his improvisatory working process. The collecting and repurposing of found objects was central to Adkins’s practice, which sought to discover the ‘potential energy’ in found materials and tap into their capacity to evoke particular ideas, with the ultimate goal of ‘transcending the physical limitations of the material’, according to the artist. This work both invokes and subverts the logic of Minimalism in its modular deployment of identical hangers and their excessive, seemingly disorderly accumulation. The title of the work references the 1927 song ‘Matchbox Blues’ by Blind Lemon Jefferson (1893–1929), who emerged as one of the most popular American country blues singers in the 1920s. (AL June 2021)