New York based artist Adam Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Canada, These Things We’ve Done Together, presents new monumental paintings from his series Untitled (WE ARE NOT) as well as seven drawings from his defining series Black Dada produced in 2021.
A visual philosophy
In his paintings, drawings and other works, Pendleton uses letters, words, drips, splatters, sprays, and collected images as primary materials. His work is a kind of continuous writing, in which language and gestural marks are recorded, transposed and overwritten. Blurring the edges between modes of viewing and reading, between representation and abstraction, and between painting, drawing and photography, Pendleton’s work is a visual philosophy of incomplete postulates. In 2008, he began to articulate his work through the idea of Black Dada, a visual project and ever-evolving inquiry into the relationships between Blackness, abstraction, and the avant-garde.
A moving video portrait
The exhibition also includes the video Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer (2016-2017), a portrayal of pioneering avant-garde dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, filmed in a New York City diner. It features the artist and Rainer in conversation as well as scenes of Rainer performing her iconic dance Trio A (1966) and reading a text prepared by Pendleton that collages writing by activists Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, poet Ron Silliman and Rainer’s friend Barbara Dilley.
