While visiting the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris last year, New York artist Slater Bradley chanced upon a children’s choir. First he spied on them, then he decided to film them. “I knew it would become something.” says Bradley, 28, who grew up in San Francisco and studied art at UCLA. “My work doesn’t start out as art. It’s about collecting, like cooking. Or chemistry. Or poetry. It’s about combining things to make something new and beautiful.” His footage is now a short video called Theory and Observation, on view in Bradley’s first museum scale show, at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies. The soundtrack layers the children’s voices with tunes by the Olympia, Washington based “suitcase muzik” group the Replikants and a recording of the Stephen Hawking talking about the universe. “Science versus religion,” explains Bradley.