Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible opens at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (CAC) on April 1, 2016 and is on view through June 16, 2016.
The exhibition is curated by Andrea Andersson Ph.D., The Helis Foundation Chief Curator of Visual Arts, and organized by the CAC. It will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, in summer 2016. Becoming Imperceptible takes its name from the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, with whose philosophical works Pendleton has long engaged, and positions Pendleton’s practice as a kind of counter-portraiture. If traditional portraiture figures the subject in contrast to or against its background, Pendleton’s works aim to disappear or camouflage the subject amid constantly alternating surfaces. The same or almost the same images return again and again across the exhibition, sometimes resurfacing without notice, and always signifying differently.
Refusing the constancy of context, Pendleton’s images are let loose – to participate in alternative narratives and interpretive traditions. Drawing from the histories of the Civil Rights and Black Resistance movements, Black aesthetic tradition, and the historical avant-garde, Becoming Imperceptible invites you to reimagine both our history and future and opens up a rigorous conversation about system and form in the European, African, and American avant-gardes of the last century.