An experimental conceptualist, Adam Pendleton manipulates language to provocatively juxtapose signification and abstraction. In his early poster-sized silkscreen paintings, Pendleton fused politically charged photographs with suggestive love poems, while in his more recent Reading Series, he fills canvases with phrases "in no particular order" from thinkers as diverse as Jean-Luc Godard and Malcolm X.

A Virginia native and Brooklyn transplant, Pendleton has shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art. In addition to creating visual works, Pendleton also co-edits LAB MAG with writer Bartholomew Ryan. The magazine brings together experimental architects, poets, graphic designers, and visual artists in a fluid PDF format that resists conventional layout and reading styles.

For New York's PERFORMA 07 in November, Pendleton presented The Revival, a commissioned performance that merged the fervor of the gospel tradition with the avant-garde practices of conceptual art and poetry. Pendleton delivered a sermon based on the writings of playwright and ACT UP founder Larry Kramer and poet Paolo Javier, and his words were accompanied by passionate music and declarations from jazz pianist Jason Moran, vocalist Alicia Hall Moran, poet Jena Osman, and artist Liam Gillick. As with many of Pendleton's works, The Revival offers insights on language and rhetoric by splicing together wildly disparate source materials. Throughout his practice, Pendleton remains concerned with how language shapes human experience. His work engages viewers as both objects and agents of meaning, as their perceptions, desires, and identities simultaneously generate and are generated.

-TJL