Encodings: Studio Museum in Harlem Artist In Residence Exhibition
Studio Museum in Harlem
New York, NY
The 2008–09 artists in residence, Dawit L. Petros, Khalif Kelly, and Adam Pendleton, consider looking at an artwork akin to the act of reading. In his own way, each shows a deep concern with how images generate meaning and has developed his own grammar and narrative system with which to make images. The resulting works and projects that make up Encodings reflect contemporary art’s concern with language and its use across media and beyond the studio and gallery spaces. For these artists, images are as much readable containers of information as they are systems for masking meaning.
During his residency, Dawit L. Petros took a series of walks around Harlem. Out of these meanderings came Petros’s Harlechrome series (2009), which photographically isolates and captures colors and textures from the area to create an abstract and semi-abstract photographic archive of Harlem. By editing images to reduce the neighborhood to texture and color, Petros offers an alternative narrative for the community, one told through formal attributes rather than social history and mythology.
Organized by the Museum's Assistant Curator, Naomi Beckwith, Encodings is the latest annual summer exhibition featuring works by the three artists who have been awarded year-long residencies at The Studio Museum in Harlem.
