Mark Bradford: Urban Collage

I met Mark Bradford in my first semester in undergrad at UCLA in 2001. Malerie Marder, my photography teacher brought our class to his studio to see his work. Not only did the man have an amazing presence, towering above us with a booming voice, but his work was incredible. He left such an impression on me for many years I kept the flier from his show and a sheet of the perm paper that he gets from African American barber salons to make his collages. I have a feeling that these now-collectibles have probably disappeared by now, but  I just found him in a google search for another artist who's name I forgot. The keywords were "famous collage artist, los angeles". 


The piece below is in the Saatchi Gallery collection. And I caught a glimpse of this piece in the google images preview and I knew it was his work. 

Kryptonite 

Mixed Media Collage on Paper

2006

I saw him at the ICA in Boston back in 2008. I was really excited to see his work in the top floor gallery alongside the Anish Kapoor show. Now I realize what I really love about it: it's relevance and aesthetic resemblance to the urban grid, urbanism and architecture. It is a landscape of its own, a montage of signs and squares in a huge blended field that is the city. The city as an infrastructural palimpsest.

Below are shots of Mark Bradford's work I took at the ICA in Boston from my iPhone camera back in 2008:

The following is another image from the Saatchi collection:

The Devil is Beating His Wife 

Billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, permanent-wave end papers, stencils, and additional mixed media on plywood

2003

Mark Bradford had an impact on me, when I was an 18 year old kid in art school. His work will forever be imprinted in my mind.

Final Project Inspiration

Today we had a mini-review from a number of critics including Alan Lewis, Principal at Hargraves Associates, a local landscape architecture firm here in San Francisco. He was a rigorous critic with no-holds-barred. It was clear we have a lot of work ahead of us. Our final critique is 10 days away, so the presentation contained a lot of "place-holder" imagery, like clunky Rhino model shots that are not showing much detail yet, we need all our diagrams, but we also need to reveal the experiential qualities of the space.

Before describing the project in detail, I thought I'd give a sneak peak on some of the rendering precedents that we are looking at for inspiration. The elements we like are collage, atmospheric and textured qualities, incorporation of some black and white retro people, and a splash of humor.

Here are some rendering inspirations that we found through KRob:

Nathan Freise

 Nathan Freise

Pascal Bronner

Jerry Lai

On Saturday April 30th Ellen Anderson and I plan to have an amazing set of renderings to go along with our master plan project. Stay tuned for the final products.

On Decay / Renewal

I am attempting to finish putting together my portfolio this weekend. Working on it for several weeks now and rooting through old files, I found this scan of a 4x7 print from a 35mm SLR: an alley in Barcelona in 2003. Pivotal to my development as an architect, the moment depicts a relief on the wall revealing the history of the city through decay. It holds a beauty in its honesty unique from the rest of the intricate local fabric. Decay represents renewal, as well as the temporal quality of what is usually considered permanent: architecture. 

Architecture is fragile. And there is a peacefulness to the architecture that only exists as a frayed edge of the urban fabric, freshly carved and ready for reassesment. 

Bano Demolido

Alex Spautz

2004

Later in my path to architecture I worked for MH/A in San Francisco and managed events at 3A Gallery. In April of 2008, I contacted Katherine Westerhout's dealer (Electric Works Gallery) and we set up a show of her Detroit work. The large format photographic prints of interior shots of derelict buildings in Detroit was a huge success. Detroit represents less opportunity and more return to nature. It is unfortunate it also implies urban sprawl, but ironic that the reason for this change was because of the decline of the car industry in the U.S.





Katherine Westerhout
Richmond III
2002


Now having studied architecture, landscape urbanism and urban design at CCA, I reflect back on the affect photography of decay had on me, and I recognize a clear relationship. Alan Berger's "Drosscape" and the Antoine Picon article "Ancient Landscapes From Ruin to Rust" are only a couple texts that begin to represent the embedded implications in the crumbling city center of Detroit, as well as the opportunity for renewal in frayed gaps and edges in the city fabric. 

Alan Berger
Graphic on Urban Sprawl in Atlanta, Drosscape
2006