Category Archives: Slater Bradley

Slater Bradley >< Intermission >< November – December 2005

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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.

The Rose Garden Without Thorns >< July – August 2004

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„The Rose Garden without Thorns“
8 July –  11 September 2004

Slater Bradley, Brice Dellsperger, Dan Fischer, Irina Georgieva, Erik Hanson, Michael Huey, Justin Lieberman, Tam Ochiai, Jon Routson, Jack Smith, Jean-Luc Verna

This show is about the richly complicated relationships that artists have with each other. It is not a show about appropriation, theft or homage, but these strategies are certainly addressed. The emphasis here is on figuration rather than abstraction in art objects. The inspiration for “The Rose Garden Without Thorns” is a drawing made by Jack Smith, the underground filmmaker whose spirit runs throughout Andy Warhol’s network of ‘superstars’. 

Slater Bradley has made many series using a Doppelgänger as a stand in for himself, and also for Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson and Ian Curtis.

Brice Dellsperger remakes scenes from movies using the same actor for every part in the scene. Often the actors are playing their parts in drag, confusing identifications and identities.

Dan Fisher makes very tight renderings of well known photographs of artists.

Irina Georgieva is making pieces she considers diaristic, combining images of artworks with images from her childhood in Sofia. All are distilled to a commonality of technique and then subject to her train of consciousness associations.

Erik Hanson deliberately quotes the music that defined him as the subject of all of his work.

Having recently completed a massive genealogical study of his family, Michael Huey is now re-photographing odd remnants he has come across, including receipts for death certificates, or a drawing of the stars made by a grandmother.

Justin Lieberman references artists and musicians in combinations he finds interesting. He reimagines Henry Darger landscapes populated by Jock Sturges’ adolescent girls and Paul McCarthy’s monsters.

Tam Ochiai makes work that references cinema, music, artists, and even galleries, museums and museum gift shops. He once made a sculpture of Gilbert and George’s singing sculpture.

Jon Routson has made a twenty minute version of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4, edited for TV, and interspersed with commercials.

Jean-Luc Verna has starred in many of Brice Dellsperger’s films. His own work is very much about his body, he makes drawings that are made the way tattoos are made and refer to something he loves.

 

The Rose Garden Without Thorns >< Photo Gallery