Mark Bradford: Super 8 Movies
From his home in Los Angeles, artist Mark Bradford shares childhood memories of creating films with friends. Set against a backdrop from the artist’s own collection of Super 8 footage, the movies reveal aspects of the artist’s childhood, as collected through his own perspective. “As a kid, I would lay down on this grass and look up at the sky and I would see clouds.” Bradford recounts, “And I remember one day, I told my friends, ‘I’m going to make a movie, and we’re all going to watch a movie, and it’s going to be free…and I was going to project it on the cloud.”
Credits
Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Monte Matteotti. Artwork courtesy: Mark Bradford.
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Mark Bradford transforms materials scavenged from the street into wall-size collages and installations that respond to the impromptu networks—underground economies, migrant communities, or popular appropriation of abandoned public space—that emerge within a city. Drawing from the diverse cultural and geographic makeup of his southern Californian community, Bradford’s work is as informed by his personal background as a third-generation merchant there as it is by the tradition of abstract painting developed worldwide in the twentieth century. Bradford’s videos and map-like, multilayered paper collages refer not only to the organization of streets and buildings in downtown Los Angeles, but also to images of crowds, ranging from civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s to contemporary protests concerning immigration issues.
Coming Home
“As a kid, I would lay down on this grass and look up at the sky and I would see clouds. And I remember one day I said ‘Oh you know what..’ I told my friends, I’m gonna have a movie, I’m going to make a movie, and we’re all going to watch a movie and it’s going to be free. And I was going to project it on the clouds… because I was the creator, I was the wizard.”
Mark Bradford
Politics, Process, and Postmodernism
Artist Mark Bradford discusses his process and sources of inspiration, as well as his work’s relation to politics and postmodernism.
