NEVER BET AGAINST ME is Slater Bradley’s new series of oil paintings embodying ideas of changing youth culture, the appropriation of it by advertising and the diminishing space between celebrity and fan.
The show evolves Bradley’s interest in the changes in youth culture over the past twenty years, from the dark shadows of the early 1990s to the ‘extra bright’ social media driven mainstream of today. Bradley’s paintings interpolate lyrics from artists including NIrvana and Kanye West with symbols from the Voyager Golden Records (the 1977 phonograph records of Earth’s sounds and images sent into space on the Voyager spacecraft), addressing the antagonism between self-discovery and selling out within the analog generation of the 90’s, the cynical appropriation of subcultures through advertising, and the sincere, fluid re-appropriation of these branding strategies by a digital generation of targeted youth.
