Event Calendar

Frieze Uptown Friday

featuring Derrick Adams and Edgar Arceneaux

May 4, 2012 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Theatre, Galleries
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  • Derrick Adams
    I Am The Milky Way, The Truth and The Life #2, 2011–12
    Performance still from “Communicating with Shadows (Nauman),” 2011
    Courtesy the artist

  • Derrick Adams
    I Crush A Lot  #3, 2011–12
    Performance still from “Communicating with Shadows (Hammons),” 2011
    Courtesy the artist

Join The Studio Museum in Harlem in celebrating the Frieze Art Fair with a special evening including a cocktail reception; opportunities to view the current exhibitions Shift: Projects | Perspectives | DirectionsRalph Lemon: 1856 Cessna Road, Kira Lynn Harris: The Block | Bellona , Who, What, Wear: Selections from the Permanent Collection, and Harlem Postcards; a site-specific performance of Derrick Adams's ongoing solo project Communicating with Shadows and a book signing with Edgar Arceneaux.

In Communicating with Shadows, New York-based artist Derrick Adams (b. 1970, Baltimore, Maryland) selects iconic photographic documentations of performances by post-war artists including Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper, Senga Nengudi and David Hammons. He projects these images, adding slight animation and a soundtrack composed by Ramon Silva, then improvises in front of them, casting his own shadow over the original images. Adams uses mass-produced objects as props and costumes to create what he calls “an attempt to channel the original performances' essence and intention.” Animating the original live action, Adams transforms still photographs into the conceptual building blocks and interactive sets of his performances.

Adams received his BFA from Pratt Institute and his MFA from Columbia University, and has completed the the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture program and The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program. He has been in numerous exhibitions at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1 and Performa. He is the recipient of a 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award.

LA-based artist Edgar Arceneaux will sign copies of Hopelessness Freezes Time, a book written in conjunction with scholar Julian Meyers and Underground Resistance, a Detroit-based techno collective described as “the most militantly political example of modern Detroit techno with a grungy four-track aesthetic.” The text presents an investigation of subterranean Detroit, including discussions of Michael Heizer's 1971 earthwork Dragged Mass, the Detroit riots of '67, Underground Resistance, and Drexciya, a fictional underwater city in Lake Michigan imagined by techno musicians and artists in the early 1990s. Hopelessness Freezes Time, in its thorough explorations, responds to the rich contemporary discourse surrounding contemporary art practice in Detroit.

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