Pardo's work has been widely exhibited in museums, galleries and public spaces since the late 1980s, but it remains among the most difficult to define. The meaning of his work shifts according to the way it is categorized, installed and used. Pardo defines the objects he creates as "paintings," "drawings," and "sculpture,” but to the viewer these objects may look like a glass globe lamp, decorative tabletop, or a chair.

Pardo created most of his work for installations at galleries, museums, or specific locations. His projects and groupings of works embodied a particular course of exploration and inquiry into the aesthetic experience that Pardo pursued at the time they were created. The gallery space or site itself established the framework that influenced the viewer's response. In most cases, these installations were dismantled after the exhibition and the individual objects were dispersed to collectors and museums. Some collectors use these works as functioning furniture. A bedroom set Pardo designed in the 1990s, for example, furnishes a collector’s bedroom, and Pardo's lamps illuminate homes throughout the world. Installations for the Dia Art Foundation's bookstore and lobby in New York and Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum's video lounge were designed to be used by visitors. Pardo's family lives in the house in Los Angeles that he built as his solo exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Other collectors and museums present these objects as art works to be looked at, but not touched. As Pardo notes, "When you open up the context, you cannot control how it will be used."

Instead of recreating the original installations for this museum survey, Pardo created a new context for the work that is at once familiar and disarming. Jorge Pardo: House adopts the premise of a “home” in which his works are organized and presented in separate vignettes that represent various areas of a house - - - garden, kitchen, dining room, bedroom, etc. The work is organized and placed according to its apparent function -- beds, chest of drawers, and sexy, high-heeled slippers, are arranged in the bedroom, a refrigerator and table define another gallery as the kitchen, and an architectural folly establishes another area as the garden. In each gallery, mural-sized photographs of corresponding rooms in the houses Pardo built and installation views of exhibitions create a disorienting space for viewers that oscillates between the physical space they are occupying and the space represented in the photo-mural.

By reassembling works from the past to the present in this exhibition, the artist's career becomes better defined. Pardo belongs to the first generation of artists to use computers as a tool for creating work. (His class at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena was the first to be given Apple computers.) The exposure to the computer radicalized his thoughts about categorization and the simultaneity of information. His paintings, for instance, are created on the computer and consequently exist in a suspended state. They have the potential of existing in a variety of shapes, sizes, colors, or formats until Pardo creates the physical work. Multi-tasking is a trait Pardo and most of his generation, take for granted, and the environments he creates lend themselves to multi-tasking and a multiplicity of meaning. Viewers are often confounded by their attempts to determine where and on what they should focus in his installations. There is no clear hierarchy between the objects and the architecture containing them.

The use of architecture to establish an experience for the viewer is especially apparent in House. Pardo designed the floor plan to control the way people enter the gallery and to heighten their sensitivity to the environment. There is no clear path through the exhibition. The kaleidoscopic angled effect of the walls creates a disorienting space and the imposing photomurals compete with the objects for the viewer's attention.

Although Pardo's work provokes thought, he does not start with an idea that he aims to transform into a physical object. Rather, his approach is more speculative, and as he works he poses more problems to himself. Over the course of the years, Pardo's work has become less anecdotal. He even eliminated titles for his work because it limited their meaning. In his estimate, his most successful works function phenomenological rather than didactically.

Jorge Pardo was born in Havana, Cuba in 1963. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.