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Whereas the doppelganger traditionally has the upper hand and calls the shots, Bradley seizes the initiative in his video work. The project began – as is fitting – with a case of mistaken identity: tired of hearing tales of nighttime adventures at places he’d never been, Bradley went out to find the man who looked just like him. Enter Benjamin Brock, Bradley’s real life doppelganger, whom Bradley befriended in 1999 and now scripts, directs, and produces as ‘himself.’ It is not clear, however, who actually is the doppelganger in Bradley’s work: is it Brock or the iconic figures whom Brock enacts: Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson, John Bonham, or Luke Skywalker / Mark Hamill? In Bradley’s mobilization of the doppelganger, Benjamin Brock is neither simply playing Slater Bradley nor is he merely assuming the role of these cultural icons. Rather, Brock plays Bradley playing each of these modern mythological figures populating our media saturated collective unconsciousness. In the space between oneself and society’s defining icons – a space defined by desire, adulation, and envy – Bradley inserts his real life doppelganger. Bradley casts another as himself, so that he in turn can play another. With this inflation of the double, Bradley transforms the doppelganger into a tripleganger: the interplay between oneself, one’s double, and life’s icons – a triangle of desire and displacement in which intimacy and distance share the same space. (Fleming)
