IN the LA Times, Christopher Knight reports about a sign that went up over Steve Turner Contemporary, a Wilshire Boulevard gallery directly across the street from the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “On black tarpaulin lying flat on the rooftop, capital letters in white paint implore, ‘HELP US.’ The sign is by artist Mark Bradford, whose mixed-media collage paintings are usually assembled from handbills, beauty parlor tissue paper, service advertisements posted on neighborhood fences and other such material, which he tears, layers, scrapes and weathers, often on large canvases. He calls his source material ‘the white noise of the street.’ The dense yet often lyrical paintings seek to tap into the random vitality born of an accumulation of urban signs. ‘HELP US’ hits a different chord. Its street origins are the same, tracking memories of neighborhoods like the Lower 9th Ward, but its effect on a Los Angeles rooftop 30 months later is very different. This painting is a spectral ghost, haunting the private imagination and the national soul.” Read more. Curiously, the gallery is presenting a live feed of this very inactive, stationary project. Perhaps Bradford sees it as a poignant comment on inaction.
“HELP US: An Installation by Mark Bradford,” Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA. Through
