JORGE PARDO

Pardo is most known for his houses, which fluidly traverse the boundaries between art, sculpture and architecture. In 1998 he built 4166 Sea View Lane, a horseshoe-shaped house he designed for The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). The building, lit with 110 hand-blown biomorphic glass lamps inside, was displayed for five weeks. After the exhibition ended, Pardo moved into the house and lived there until he built another residence in Mérida. According to the artist, Mérida House—his home in the Mexican city since 2008—is ‘a building transformed into a sculpture that is also a place of residence’. Tecoh (2012), built in Yucatán, continues to reflect Pardo’s preoccupation with intersections. Dubbed by Pardo as ‘architecture without a program’, the house has no beginning point and easily merges with its environment or collapses into something different. Most strikingly, the three-dimensional ceiling warps into the roof of a sculpture garden.

In addition to his houses, lamps frequent Pardo’s oeuvre, and his work is also characterised by an investigation of technological possibilities. Between 2008 and 2009 Pardo used 3D printing technology to fabricate digital scans of the people he had worked with, and to shape them into life-size lamps. At once his lamps adopted dual identities—as lamps, they were familiar, mundane objects to the viewer; yet as portraits, they were works of art.

Pardo reiterated his questioning of the distinction between function and art in Meretricious (2015), an exhibition at David Gill Gallery, London, where he displayed oval-shaped mirrors adorned with cross-sections of human skulls. The cerebral decorations, cut on a CNC router, reference writers or thinkers, such as Clement Greenberg, Hal Foster, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Jonathan Gold.

Born in Havana, Cuba, Pardo migrated to the United States with his family as a young child. After initially attending the University of Illinois to study biology, he transferred to ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. Pardo has exhibited internationally, including the Venice Biennale (2017); joségarcía ,mx, Mérida (2016); Gagosian, Los Angeles (2010); and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008). He has also received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship (2010), the Smithsonian American Art Museum Lucelia Artist Award (2001) and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1995). The artist currently lives and works in Mérida, Mexico.

Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2018