Slater Bradley

Slater Bradley (born 1975) is an American conceptual and cross-disciplinary artist, typically working in thematic series and installations. In his video works, Bradley often combines footage of real events, soundtracks drawn from classical and contemporary music as well as references to literary, scientific, or historical works. In his most recent work, Bradley manipulates photographic material by using markers and eliminating backgrounds as well as removing known icons from their time and place.

Bradley was dubbed the "unintended king of serendipity" by curator Heidi Zuckerman The show featured the video work The Laurel Tree (Beach) (2000) with actress Chloë Sevigny standing on a cloudy beach reciting Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger (1903). Sevigny's “uninflected manner” is particularly pared down as the speech she delivers happens to be incredibly loaded, as described in a review by Frieze Magazine: For, after all, what more pitiable sight is there than life led astray by art? We artists have a consummate contempt for the dilettante, the man who is leading a living life and yet thinks he can be an artist too if he gets half the chance. but the work never reveals the fate of the gargoyle. In JFK Jr., Slater Bradley reflects on “the culture of loss and remembrance”. having held a solo exhibition in 2003 at the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum at Bard College and being included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial with the video Theory and Observation which critic Jerry Saltz described as one of "the most ravishing works in the show". The video contemplates the relationship between reason and faith and features close-ups of a youth choir in the cathedral of Notre-Dame. The work “stunningly capture states of gawkiness and anxiety in kids whose singing channels divinity” as described by the art critic Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker

In 2005, Bradley was awarded by the NASA Art Program, and produced the video work Dark Night of the Soul (2005-2006) in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History. The work portrays an astronaut walking through the galleries of the American Museum of Natural History in New York to the re-recording of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, performed on a flute. The lone character explores representations of Earth and outer space as if visiting a strange new world. “Alluding to images of science and history, as well as an already past future referenced in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bradley’s film evokes unspoken connections between imagination and fact.”

The Doppelganger It was at the Charlatan show, Slater Bradley introduced the concept of “The Doppelganger” – as in ‘one who goes twice’ – with his photographic work My Doppelganger as Ian Curtis in a Charlatan Pose (Cigarette) as the postcard for the show. Here, Bradley began passing off photographs of his double, portrayed by model Benjamin Brock (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Bradley himself), as though they were images of himself. In a review of Charlatan, critic Roberta Smith offers the statement "It is a declaration of artistic intent that makes one eager to see what Mr. Bradley will do next."

Later, in 2001, during the show Trompe le Monde at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris, Bradley reintroduced the concept in a video installation featuring “Slater” waking up in his apartment and walking out into New York City. The seminal concept of The Doppelganger continued to be woven into Bradley's work in the following years.

In 2002, during the show Here are the Young Men at Team Gallery, Bradley presented the work Factory Archives (2002), which would later become the first of three videos in the acclaimed Doppelganger Trilogy (also including Phantom Release (2003) and Recorded Yesterday (2004)). The trilogy revolves around the subject of "recycled illusions that are the reality of pop culture" and conjures up three pop icons, Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson, described by Nancy Spector, curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, as “fallen heroes”. Spector continues: “two by suicide and one by a protracted descent into disrepute—these figures are perceived through the distancing lens of desire and memory.” Slater Bradley explicitly situates his work in the context of the fandom surrounding these three fallen heroes, which he summons from the dead.

Bradley describes Ian Curtis – the subject/ object of Factory Archives (2002) – as a “cult hero” and explains how: “[the Nirvana video] Phantom Release links itself directly to the fans,” bringing together “images and performances culled and homogenized from my memories of MTV, concert documentaries, magazine covers, Saturday Night Live, and three concerts I had seen in San Francisco”; The three video works featured recordings of a faux concert performances, such as in Factory Archives (2002), where Curtis, lead singer of the punk band Joy Division, is depicted as an elusive performer just before the dawn of MTV.

In 2004, Bradley showed at the Museum of Modern Art's Premieres and exhibited the Doppelganger Trilogy at the Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe. In 2005, the trilogy was shown by the Guggenheim under the title Recent Acquisitions: Slater Bradley's Doppelganger Trilogy. The same year, the work The Year of the Doppelganger was shown at the Berkeley Art Museum, organized by BAM/PFA and curated by Heidi Zuckerman. The video installations blend the widely recognizable drumbeat from Led Zeppelin “When The Levee Braks”, performed by Bradley’s doppelganger, with a surprise appearance by the Cal football team, entering the stadium to practice.

Zuckerman writes: "By replacing himself with another, Bradley highlights the fallacy of individuality and underscores his own mortality. Like many artists of his generation (he is thirty), Bradley exhibits a fascination with death in much of his work. ... With an uncanny ability to channel moments loaded with cultural relevance, equipped only with a video camera, Slater Bradley becomes a clairvoyant for collective consciousness.”

‘The Year of the Doppelganger’ was also shown at Barbara Gladstone Gallery as part of the group show "Bridge Freezes Before Road" (June 24 – August 6, 2005), which was featured in the art review "Fanciful to Figurative to Wryly Inscrutable," by Holland Cotter, as well as on the front page of the New York Times' arts section. The work was acquired by MoMA and is part of the museum’s collection.

The theme of pop culture was continually referenced throughout Bradley's work until The Doppelganger's symbolic death in the 3-channel film Dead Ringer (2011), a groundbreaking collaboration between Bradley and noted cinematographer Ed Lachman.

Collaboration with Ed Lachman In 2010, Bradley held an exhibition at the Whitney Museum in collaboration with Academy Award nominated cinematographer Edward Lachman, whose best known films include Far from Heaven, Erin Brockovich, and The Virgin Suicides. Lachman was director of photography for the 1993 film Dark Blood, starring River Phoenix, and which was still in production at the time of the actor’s sudden death.

“Bradley, whose photographs and films explore celebrity and the fractured nature of identity, worked with Lachman to create two video installations and a series of photographs referencing Dark Blood, derived from Lachman’s memories of filming the original work and combined with Bradley’s complex identification with the late actor as both subject and symbol.” Filmed seventeen years later in the same location, Shadow features the imagined past of the main character, combining images from the original film with new footage. Artists have long engaged with the mythology of Hollywood, “creating a hybrid of art and cinema that has become an important strand of contemporary art”. and Bradley began to re-invent himself through rigorous spiritual introspection. Moving from pop cultural icons and references, towards a more abstract and energy-aware artistic approach, this development in Slater Bradley’s work was – as described by Heidi Zuckerman – driven by the artist’s intuition.thumb Factory Icon 2000/2017To share the learnings from his encounters with transcendence, Bradley co-founded a project space with Johannes Fricke Waldhausen in Munich called Goodroom where he exhibited and offered natal chart readings in December 2015. His work was curated into the group exhibition Dreaming Mirrors Dreaming Screens at Sprüth Magers gallery in 2016 with thirteen other artists including Jon Rafman, Andy Hope 1930 and Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin. The show considered the increasingly complex human relationship with screens, objects that have evolved to function as dual representations of both “the rational and the dreamlike.” True Faith, an exhibition curated by Matthew Higgs and Jon Savage with the collaboration of archivist Johan Kugelberg in Manchester, England, was part of a 2017 city-wide arts festival commissioned to celebrate the music of Joy Division and explore their continuing cultural impact as a powerful inspiration to visual artists. Bradley’s photograph Factory Icon from 2000, portraying the artist’s doppelganger as Ian Curtis, was re-worked in the proportions of the golden rectangle and featured on the cover of the exhibition catalogue as well as displayed on banners hung throughout the city. Also on view was a video from Bradley's Doppelganger Trilogy from 2001–2004. As noted by Adrian Seattle writing for The Guardian, "in this work, it is not Ian Curtis on stage at all, but a double (Bradley’s other Doppelganger video portraits portray Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson). The harder you look, the more difficult it is to grasp the image. The singer is only a trace: pinwheeling arms, a jerky back-and-forth shuffle, a looming face that comes and goes, that sonorous baritone voice, a thing more solid and permanent than this fleeting figure."

Sundoor By shifting the focus towards the spiritual dimensions, rather than channeling pop icons, the inner focus becomes apparent in Bradley’s more recent work, such as the Shields series, where ancient cosmology and astrological themes play a significant role. The Shield series consists of hundreds of thousands of paint-pen strokes that create both subtle graduations and patterns. The experience of the works, as well as the process behind, calls upon hypnotic or even meditative concentration, and reminds the viewer of both organic tissue and radiant halos of cosmic dust.

In the artists’ most recent installation works, the collective spiritual experience and sacred sites are explored through transcultural cosmology, philosophy, and mythology. His work includes several recurring forms and figures, such as the pentagram as a symbol of Venus and divine femininity, crystal stones and the oculus, the portal to the divine, as well as an ancient color palette of deep blue and gold, which throughout history has been connected to transcendence and the divine across belief systems.

In 2017, Zuecca Projects presented Sundoor at World’s End, featuring Bradley’s sculpture Crystal Labyrinth (La Maddalena) in Venice, Italy in 2017, concurrent with the 57th Biennale. The installation, consisting of 888 rose quartz crystals forming a 7-meter diameter labyrinth and surrounded by solar shields, was installed from May through November at :it:Chiesa della Maddalena (Venezia) (Church of Mary Magdalene) and was accompanied by a soundtrack by composer Dustin O’Halloran. It is a mystical work about spiritual ascension, and in the words of John Major Jenkins, the "journey up through the planetary spheres of the ecliptic to the door of the Most High, the Sol Invictus, the Eighth Gate, the realm of the Hypercosmic Sun."

Sundoor at World’s End was nominated for a Global Fine Art Award for Best Public Exhibition.

Slater Bradley: Sundoor a monograph featuring texts by both John Major Jenkins and Rachel Baum was released in December 2018 by Kerber Verlag. The publication considers his international installation work dealing with collective spiritual experience, sacred sites, and personal histories. Bradley describes in an interview with Artsy how he thinks “there’s a neo-spiritual art movement happening.” He says: “At a certain point the truth is a bigger subject than pop culture. With meditation you find your inner peace, your inner truth, your centered truth, and then you find the world, and the world finds its center. That’s a noble pursuit for art these days.” The book launched as part of the exhibition Under the Sunbeams opening at therethere gallery in Los Angeles in February 2019. Bradley exhibited his series of D8S paintings which play off the geometrics of astrological charts from chosen moments in time inspired by birthdates, founding fathers, origin stories pulled from the past and future.

The Gates of Many Colors Slater Bradley’s recent body of work, The Gates of Many Colors, sees the artist (The Artist) adopting the role of a diviner. But “can The Artist, as an archetype, connect our secular contemporary realities to a more transcendental awareness that incorporates our ancient wisdoms, systems, and even prophecies?” In eight digital photographs transferred onto two-meter-high canvases, the gates of Jerusalem’s Old City Wall are depicted as monumental edifices with visible everyday features like parked cars and graffiti. However, the photographs have also been altered with the gate portal appearing as another color.

The Gates of Many Colors was scheduled to open at Galería Pelaires, but postponed and later shut down due to COVID-19.