HOUSE PENCIL GREEN

House Pencil Green is the multivalent, multimedia, multi-platform collaboration between interdisciplinary artist/designers Amy Ruddick and Joseph Herring. HPG was formed just half a block from the location of the first filmed pie-in-the-face and in the actual shadow of Charlie Chaplain’s Edendale home. The location was in Echo Park, in the old Edendale neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA, that silent-era center of Pacific Coast motion picture production and the home of the Keystone Kops.

House Pencil Green now sits at the intersection of sculpture and post-dramatic theatre, on the corner of time-based media and installation, just a block north of video and performance. At House Pencil Green, pre-recorded and live-produced video elements interact with built and modified objects, environments, and live performance. Events further the evolution of the space that contains them.

Part design troupe and part performance art company, House Pencil Green was formed to explore relationships between design and performance art, between program and movement, between low and high, between the vernacular and the absurd, between color and memory.

With House Pencil Green, demonstrably harebrained and visibly skewed investigations into the nature of media are juxtaposed in the delineated space of performance, installation, and exhibition, all in an attempt to understand our contemporary sublime, to reconcile our past, our future, and our present.

Through the development of interactions among objects, environments, and technologies, House Pencil Green simultaneously courts and resists a relationship with narrative inquiry, creating projects equally influenced by vernacular performing traditions, the history of children’s television, and sculpture in the expanded field.