About the collaboration
Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible is the first in a collaborative series of artist’s books in which each year Siglio and Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans invite an artist to intervene in the history and space of the book in conjunction with an exhibition at CAC. Each artist is presented with the opportunity to inhabit, explore, expand, and rethink the space of the book so that it becomes much more than a documentary or archival device. Instead, it offers a space for new forms and methods as well as for a direct, intimate encounter between the artist and reader.
To honor and accommodate a wide variety of sensibilities, aesthetics and subject matter, all of the books in this collection will be different sizes, on different paper, with varying interpretations of the physical nature of the book. The collection does have common denominators: the books are paperback with reverse french-fold dust jackets that feature poster-sized artworks by each artist as well as a booklet of critical essays about each artist’s work. Cecilia Vicuña will be the next artist to participate in the series in 2017.
About the artist’s book and the artist
Reframed, reconditioned, and perpetually reoccurring, found images have served as Adam Pendleton’s primary tools and source material throughout his practice. Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible follows the logic of Pendleton’s museum installations, constructing social and aesthetic histories, comprised of images in process and inscribed in the structure of their container. Including Pendleton’s texts “Black Dada” and “Amiri Baraka,” and drawing on a diverse archive that traverses European, African and American avant-gardes and civil rights movements of the last century—from Dada and Bauhaus to Black Lives Matter literature, from Language poetry to Black Power poetics, from Conceptual art to African Independence movements—Becoming Imperceptible frames a complex dialogue between culture and system. It also embodies Pendleton’s practice by inviting the reader in an unfolding conversation about race and history, art and form.
Becoming Imperceptible includes essays by Andrea Andersson, Naomi Beckwith, Kitty Scott and Stephen Squibb. The books also features three different dust jacket posters. The exhibition that this book accompanies opened April 1, 2016 and runs until June 16.
Paperback + dust jacket / 144 pages / b&w illustrations throughout / 7.125 x 9.25 / ISBN: 978-1-938221-13-2 / PUB DATE: April 26, 2016 / Available now at Siglio
Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a conceptual artist known for his multi-disciplinary practice, which moves fluidly between painting, publishing, photographic collage, video and performance. His work has most recently been exhibited in the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and Pace Gallery, London. In 2016 Mousse will release the first trade edition of Black Dada.
About Siglio Press
Siglio is an independent press dedicated to publishing uncommon books and editions that live at the intersection of art & literature: inimitable, hybrid works by renowned as well as little known artists and writers that defy categories and thoroughly engage a reader’s intellect and imagination. Artists and writers we publish include Joe Brainard, Marcel Broodthaers, John Cage, Sophie Calle, Dorothy Iannone, Jess, Ray Johnson, Richard Kraft, Robert Seydel, Nancy Spero among many others.
About Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
The Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, is a multidisciplinary arts center dedicated to presenting and enriching the art of our time—performing arts, visual arts, and, most importantly, work that operates at the intersection of these two forms.