Slater Bradley
“Intermission”
4 November – 17 December 2005
Galerie Lisa Ruyter is pleased to present Slater Bradley’s “Intermission,” the artist’s most recent attempt to capture the ghost of Michael Jackson in the video medium.
“Intermission”, a perfect pastiche of the silent film form with direct references to F.W. Murnau’s “Sunrise” is one of Slater Bradley’s most recent and well-developed Doppleganger works. In this work Benjamin Brock, a friend who looks very much like the artist, becomes a Micheal Jackson figure walking through an empty winter landscape.
The voice-over of “Intermission,” recorded by the artist at the Museum of Natural History in New York, is a father’s conversation with his little boys — among the topics discussed is the behavior of vultures. The intertitles, which foreground the piece’s allegiance to silent film, are the lyrics of a Michael Jackson song called “My Childhood.” The barren trees and the icy landscape into which the Brock/Doppelganger/Jackson figure is placed mirror the cultural landscape that is so quick to create mythic figures and to immediately destroy them.
For the past five years, Slater Bradley has enlisted the help of Benjamin Brock to create a body of imposter works. In Slater Bradley’s work, Brock has been Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, and even Slater Bradley in a complex autobiographical fiction. Slater Bradley probes the elasticity of identity and its relationship to mediated images of powerfully iconic public figures. Occupying the space between lived life and learned life, between the real and the fictive, the Doppelganger Project measures the distance from experience to its representation. What becomes of us? And how do we become us?
Slater Bradley’s first Michael Jackson reflection, “Recorded Yesterday” is concurrently being shown in the “Superstars” exhibition organized by the Kunsthalle Wien.
Slater Bradley has had one-person shows in New York, Paris, Berlin, London, Geneva, San Francisco, and Basel. He was in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and the Guggenheim Museum in New York mounted a solo show featuring his Doppelganger project, which included “Recorded Yesterday.” He has participated in numerous museum and gallery group exhibitions in such venues as the Palais de Tokyo, the Kunsthalle Fridericianium, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, the Reina Sofia. He has recently made one-person exhibitions at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies and at UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In the next year he will have solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Paris and London.
Slater Bradley was born in 1975 in San Francisco and currently lives and works in New York.