Brad Greenwood is a relatively new resident of Los Angeles. He moved west to explore new personal and artistic horizons after receiving a degree in painting from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the oldest art academy in the United States, and living and practicing for 25 years in New York City.

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Figures undergoing personal transformation, or managing changing or uncertain circumstances, have long been key to my work. Whether they are people, plants or animals, the characters in my pieces exist on multiple and psychological planes, and often seek to break the boundaries and constraints of their perceived environments. These sculpted shape-shifters live in a liminal state between literature and myth. The narratives of personal emotion they inhabit are my attempts to make sense of who we are, of what connects us all - from plants and insects to the planets and stars - and of the things that pull us apart.

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This body of work highlights an increasingly important part of my work. “Los Bocetos” are the collaged sketches that have been propelling my practice for the past five years. While these smaller, colorful and often intense works of drawing, painting and collage were originally created to help refine ideas for some of my larger pieces, increasingly, and definitely here at El Sur, they have also begun to stand alone, or in changeable groups, as independent, completed works.

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Los Bocetos tend to express sharper ideas or more easily defined moods than many of my larger, more diffuse works. Many appear at first to be humorous, romantic or playful. But in closer inspection - which the smaller scale of these works is designed to invite - often reveals darker, more difficult themes, including human disharmony, loneliness, conflict, alienation and unfulfilled desire.

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During my time at El Sur I wanted to push these sketches to new directions, for example, by breaking out of the rectangular or square form and allowing the pieces to take more sculptural forms. I have also chosen to display these works at eye-level, on handmade shelves, to encourage more in-depth examination of the colors, images and contrasts in each piece. I also continually regroup and reorganize the display, as new works are completed, to change the overall visual impression as well as the narrative that the collected works create.

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The larger works on paper in this exhibition began as an experimental effort to pare down the complicated imagery that characterizes much of my recent work. While my original intention was to simplify my use of imagery during the residency, the colors and chaos of Mexico City have entered these larger works in ways that I had not anticipated, and that in some ways go counter to my originalintent, but which have been highly inspiring, nonetheless.