Adam Pendleton’s work embraces the historical avant-garde by disrupting easy logic and established narratives. Much like the Dadaists, Pendleton investigates the potential for language as a material to rearrange and reshape history and experience. In What is the Black Dada, language and paper, traditionally used as a means to an end of communication, become both the object and subject of the work. The abstract arrangement of letters becomes the physical object, and the conceptual reinterpretation of language escapes the burden of meaning. Pendleton describes his signature “Black Dada” motif as a way of “looking at blackness as an open-ended idea, not just related to race, but in relationship to politics, to art, specifically to the avant-garde.” In this work, the layering of paper pulp builds its own history, much like Pendleton builds upon the history of Dada, and the layering of “Black” upon “Dada” invokes the political without prescribing to the viewer the intent of the work.

- Pace Prints, Inc. (Online)