FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Walter Zooi
213-503-2300 (do not publish)

BOUNCE: MARK BRADFORD AND GLENN KAINO

2-person exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by LA-based artists at Gallery at REDCAT

First major Los Angeles presentation of works by CalArts alumnus Mark Bradford and UC Irvine/UC San Diego alumnus Glenn Kaino

Catalogue to feature artists' dialogues with Kara Walker and Daniel J. Martinez

Gallery at REDCAT
Located in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex, Los Angeles, California
February 5-March 28, 2004

View the event

Los Angeles, January 7 -- The 2003-2004 inaugural season at REDCAT continues with Bounce: Mark Bradford and Glenn Kaino. CalArts alumnus Mark Bradford makes paintings that explore the limitations, restrictions and artistic tensions rooted in human experience and social negotiations of place. Glenn Kaino's often kinetic, always dynamic sculptures play off language, history and theoretical constructions to question the cultural matrix in which he is entangled. Bounce features new works by both artists commissioned by the American Center Foundation. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition features an essay by curator Eungie Joo and artists' conversations between Mark Bradford and Kara Walker, and Glenn Kaino and Daniel J. Martinez, as well as installation views of the exhibition will be available in March.

The city as an abstraction is of great interest for Mark Bradford. According to the artist, "The signage in the 'hood is about something that is abandoned.[t]he barricades that go up around burnt-out buildings, some of which are still not rebuilt from the 1992 riots. You learn quickly walking by these urban abstractions that within the walls of those abandoned buildings lie the accumulated stories, half-forgotten but retaining an energy-in-waiting." In his latest works, Bradford appropriates print advertisements by removing them from fences and walls around the city, then integrating them with various other papers, applying layer upon layer to stretched canvas. For Bounce, Bradford will unveil three new canvases that toil with Los Angeles as an atmospheric abstraction. In the ten by sixteen-foot work, Los Moscos (2003), colored paper elements and print advertising are collaged amidst a network of negative spaces and pauses. A profound absence of paint is juxtaposed with the excess of collage, obscuring figurative moments in the rescued ads. Absence and removal figure prominently in the work as the artist defaces his surfaces with household bleach, foil, and still more layers of paper.

Glenn Kaino's works explore the cultural matrix in which he operates. His recent work reveals a fascination with Rube Goldberg machines and their exaggerated economies of work, Andy Warhol and The Factory, Schrodinger's Cat, and quantum equations. He considers his approach a fourth-dimensional one, based in time and spaciality. Kaino's 2003 work In Revolution... plays off a quote attributed to Napoleon: "In Revolution, there are two types of people, those who create it and those who profit from it." With what might be considered a wry critique of revolutionary actions and their consequences, Kaino mounted a weathered engine to an A-frame base that spins a large metal propeller-a literal interpretation of cyclic rotation. On one side of the propeller is a large boulder, tethered to the edge. The other side has attached to it a square diorama of a suburban house, complete with a water-filled swimming pool. While the momentum of spinning threatens to hurl the rock as if from David's sling, the same spinning creates the force that maintains the oppositional stasis of the system, reinforcing a kind of status quo.

Mark Bradford's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York, and the Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, California, and in group exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Real Art Ways, Hartford, Connecticut; and the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California. He earned both a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. A fourth-generation Angelino, Glenn Kaino is co-founder with Daniel J. Martinez and Tracey Shiffman of Deep River Gallery, the not not-for-profit space for exhibition and experimentation in downtown Los Angeles (1997-2002). Kaino's works have been included in group exhibitions at Bronx Museum of Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles. His work will be included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Both artists live and work in Los Angeles.

Located in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex designed by Frank O. Gehry and Associates, the Roy and Edna Walt Disney/CalArts Theater is an initiative of the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts). As the professional exhibition space of an educational institution, REDCAT aims to develop unique exchanges between international artists and the CalArts community as well as the artistic community of greater Los Angeles. The Gallery at REDCAT is a 3000-square foot space dedicated to experimental artistic and curatorial practice attached to a multi-use black box theater equipped with 16mm and 35mm film projectors, Dolby THX surround sound, adaptable theater seating, and acoustics designed by Yasuhisa Toyota. REDCAT's first year of interdisciplinary programming features exhibitions, films, and performances by dumb type, Julie Mehretu, motiroti and the Builder's Association, Superflex, Chantal Ackerman, and Gimhongsok and Kim Sora. Bounce is the first REDCAT project curated by Gallery Director and Curator, Eungie Joo.

Bounce: Mark Bradford and Glenn Kaino is made possible by a generous grant from the American Center Foundation. Additional funding provided by Gil Friesen and Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York.

Back to REDCAT media/press room