Currently on View
Mark Bradford
Helter Skelter I
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| Mark Bradford, American, born 1961 Helter Skelter I, 2007 Mixed media on canvas Lent by the Dicke Collection , L13.2008 |
Visitors to The Dayton Art Institute will be greeted on their arrival in our Rotunda by Helter Skelter I, a shimmering collage by young California artist Mark Bradford (b. 1961), which will be on loan from The Dicke Collection until spring 2009. Using a distinctive approach to materials, Bradford begins works such as Helter Skelter I by collecting, soaking, and gluing together advertisements and merchant posters from his South Los Angeles neighborhood. He proceeds to outline areas of text with twine and covers the resulting surface with billboard paper. Bradford then goes back into his accretions with a sander to reveal areas that were obscured, with the intention of revealing “conditions that are going on at that particular moment at that particular location.”
An internationally-renowned artist, Bradford received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees from California Institute of the Arts. His early works were comprised of materials from the beauty salon his mother operated (and where he once worked as a stylist) and he first came to attention when his compositions were featured in Freestyle, a groundbreaking exhibition of works by 28 African-American artists that was organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001. Bradford’s work has since been featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the XXVII Sao Paulo Bienal (also 2006), the 2008 Carnegie International exhibition (currently on view in Pittsburgh), and on Art 21. Bradford is also the recipient of the prestigious Bucksbaum Award, bestowed by the Whitney Museum of American Art for significant contributions to the visual arts.
Helter-Skelter I, an ambitious work whose size endows it with the presence of an installation, was featured in “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century,” the inaugural exhibition hosted by the New Museum in New York City last winter. The lines and shapes scattered across its glistening multi-level surface take the viewer’s eye in all directions, reflecting the multiple stimuli encountered in contemporary urban environments and defying efforts to take in the entire composition at once. In creating collages that are literally the product of his community, the streets that surround him, Bradford’s materials reflect political and social changes that are taking place.
Among the artistic sources Mark Bradford references are cartography, printmaking, and the gestural marks of Abstract Expressionist painting. However, while his compositions have characteristics of painting, no paint is used in their construction. And while images such as Helter Skelter I have affinities with maps in their viewpoint—as well as in associations the silver foil may suggest to land masses or bodies of water in urban contexts—the site evoked is not an identified. Carter E. Foster, curator of drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art, notes that Bradford’s “subject matter, ultimately, evokes history and place through the fragmentation and recombination of matter from the urban environment.”