May Heaven Preserve You From Dangers and Assassins 2010

May Heaven Preserve You from Dangers and Assassins is a large, mural-sized canvas with the remains of advertising flyers collaged across its surface. It is one of a number of works made by the artist since 2009, characterised by a palette of black, white, silver and grey tones, which feature what he calls ‘merchant posters’ (there is no official name for these often hand drawn notices). These advertising flyers are taken from Bradford’s neighbourhood in Los Angeles, where they are typically affixed to the hoardings surrounding abandoned and derelict buildings. May Heaven Preserve You from Dangers and Assassins specifically features flyers selling pest control services (the word ‘BUGS is repeated across the central portion of the canvas). Like others in this body of work, such as When It Stops Snowing, which is made from advertisements that sell the facility to ‘receive calls on your cell phone from jail’, the work carries an underlying statement about the social circumstances of the target audience for these ads. Bradford is interested in the manner in which the changing notices indicate the altered circumstances that the local population experiences, and the way in which the urban fabric can be ‘read’ through this layering of signs. Although these works have a surface similarity with the work of twentieth-century European ‘affichiste’ artists such as Raymond Hains (1926–2005) and Jacques Villeglé (born 1926, see for example Jazzmen 1961, Tate T07619), Bradford is less concerned with the proliferation of commercial imagery than with the socio-political clues that his materials contain.