Mark Bradford
Hermès Project
haudenschildGarage
info [at] haudenschildgarage.com
www.haudenschildgarage.com
Project Hermès is a site-specific installation in a vacant house in La Jolla, California based on transcribed conversations between Eloisa Haudenschild in La Jolla and Mark Bradford in Los Angeles that took place from January to July 2013. From Haudenschild were stories of an eccentric former neighbor who harbored deep antagonism and paranoia towards her and her family. From Bradford was the initial impulse to research domestic settings of homemade webcam pornography, later abstracted into a web of black lines that aggressively cut across the interior of the neighbor’s dilapidated house.
Hermès, Marcos Lopez, the messenger, traveled for six months between La Jolla and Los Angeles relaying Haudenschild’s stories of hostile encounters with her neighbor to Bradford. It was only through these stories, and a scale-model made by Hermès, that Bradford experienced the space during the first few months of the project.
Project Hermès will open in August for only twenty-four hours, after which the house and the installation will be completely demolished.
What struck me was the psychological strangeness that revolved around the neighbor’s home. I’m drawn to using the home as a construct for talking about psychological conditions and the idea of voyeurism. When Hermès describes the stories of the neighbor it is as if we are peeking into her life, going through her closets, looking through her windows—it has a voyeuristic feel to it…so the line becomes a psychological and physical part of the space because she was constantly psychologically interrupted. Her mind was interrupting itself in this weird kind of madness.
–Mark Bradford
About Mark Bradford
Mark Bradford was born in 1961 in Los Angeles, where he lives and works. He has exhibited widely, including groups shows such as the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011), Seoul Biennial (2010), the Carnegie International (2008), São Paulo Biennial (2006), and Whitney Biennial (2006). Solo exhibitions include Aspen Art Museum (2011), Maps and Manifests at Cincinnati Museum of Art (2008) and Neither New Nor Correct at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007). In 2009, Mark Bradford was the recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. In 2010, You’re Nobody (Till Somebody Kills You), a large-scale survey of his work, was presented at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, before travelling to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
About Eloisa Haudenschild
Born in Buenos Aires, Eloisa Haudenschild is a collector of Latin and Chinese contemporary art, Director of the haudenschildGarage and President of the Board of inSite. In the late 1990s Eloisa began collecting young Chinese contemporary photography and video. From 2002 to 2005, she organized the exhibition Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection, which traveled to five cities in the U.S., Mexico, China and Singapore. Marking important milestones, Zooming into Focus was the first exhibition of its kind in San Diego and Singapore and the first contemporary Chinese exhibition at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico. It was the first time the Shanghai Art Museum exhibited works on contemporary Chinese video and photography from a private collection and, most importantly, it was the first retrospective exhibition of Chinese photography and video ever held at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing.
About the haudenschildGarage
In 2003, Eloisa Haudenschild founded the haudenschildGarage, a 21st-century cultural search engine. It routinely presents symposia, lectures and film screenings. In 2006, the haudenschildGarage launched SPARE PARTS, a three-year cycle of projects with Steve Fagin. Projects included Decolonizing Architecture, selected for the 2009 Architectural Venice Biennale; A Crime Has Many Stories, which premiered at MALBA in Buenos Aires in November 2008 and The Last Book performed in April 2009 at the MAK Center in Los Angeles.
For more information about this project, please contact Managing Director Monica Jovanovich-Kelley at www.haudenschildgarage.com.
