"The Refusal Work is a tribute to the conceptual artist Robert Barry, a regular contributor to Art & Project Bulletin (1968–1989). Art & Project, associated with an Amsterdam-based gallery, caught on quickly among conceptual artists as a means of developing international artistic networks through publication. Pendleton’s own conceptual practice, like that of Barry, explores art and language, and extends to the relationship between blackness and invisibility. The Refusal Work is both homage to Barry’s commitment to the unseen and an artwork that refuses, or turns away, from visual legibility. Both in its grainy reproduction of printed matter and its reflective surface, the work creates a sense of a fluctuation between visibility and invisibility. It depicts Barry’s famous 1969 project, a paradigmatic work of conceptual art, which consisted of three invitations to gallery shows in Turin, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles. Each of these announced: 'during the exhibition the gallery will be closed.' With no objects, and no access to the space of their presentation, Barry’s work raised the problem of visibility as a condition of visual art and nihilistically flouted the standards of art’s presence and presentation." – Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine
2006 Screenprint on mirrored steel plate. 30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm) Signed and numbered 17/40 in black ink on the reverse (there were also some proofs), published by BXP, Inc., New York.