“Black Dada is a way for me to talk about the future of the past.”
—Adam PendletonAdam Pendleton considers Black Dada, a term originally coined by Black Arts Movement cofounder Amiri Baraka, to be an abstract platform upon which ideas about the past are simultaneously communicated and extrapolated to reference society’s present and future. Pendleton takes individual elements from the often-static representations of history and synthesizes them with his own expansive visual language. The results are entirely new entities that preserve elements of history, while simultaneously encouraging viewers to extrapolate meaning within contemporary and future contexts. Untitled (A Victim of American Democracy), executed in 2016, is an exquisite example of the artist’s ability to meld history, language and performance into one abstract image.
"Too often the presentation of ideas, images, et cetera, doesn’t deal with the complexity of the real. I want to juxtapose peoples, moments, events, and even forms with historical periods where their influence/presence is often not considered and at times acknowledged.”
—Adam PendletonA phrase taken from a 1964 speech by Malcolm X, “a victim of American democracy” is fractured into incomplete segments and repeatedly painted, laser-printed, and screen-printed in different sizes among a field of vertical lines, creating a dense cacophony of black and white. The individual letters seem to weave under, around and through the lines, defying the sense of division and rigidity they create. As these thoughts presented nearly six decades earlier appear to resist both the compositional division and the established method of consuming written language, viewers are encouraged to contemplate both the historic meaning and contemporary significance of “A Victim of American Democracy.” To Pendleton, this moment of reflection is tied to the exhibition title, “Midnight in America,” a reference to Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Pendleton asks his viewer to question these binaries and oppositions and asks them to not think of them as “light and dark, where light is good and dark is bad. It’s rather that we’re opening up to a different realm, a different sense of possibility.”i
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