My work over the past decade has explored the possibilities of merging sacred site photography directly with the energy of specific astrological transits and astronomical alignments, in particular those centered around the current Winter Solstice alignment with the Galactic Center.
A recurring rhetorical question: Can the magnetism of a highly energized or sacred place be transferred directly through the photographic data and subsequent painterly intervention in a hybridized art object?
I went to an Episcopalian school in San Francisco as a boy, and the fables of Jerusalem captured my imagination. Years ago, I understood the Gates of the Holy City to be metaphors for the Chakra energy systems of the physical body and auric field, the culmination of the Spiritual Journey being the purification and divine alignment of those Gates within.
The “New Jerusalem Gates” are indeed a psychedelic twin to the first series “The Gates of Many Colors”. A veiled allusion to the Biblical prophecy of the Third Temple and New Jerusalem, the hallucinatory colors of the New Gates point to the activation of an Open Third Eye, the Ajna chakra representing Aquarius, and the supernatural abilities of astral travel.
The Cloud Phoenix, an archetypal symbol revealed to me by Spirit above the Aegean Sea, refers to this interdimensional travel and rebirth of the 2160 year cycle of the Age of Aquarius that is upon us, as activated by the Winter Solstice alignment.
This is the theorized Golden Age of Fixed Air, where breakthrough technology allows for the free flow of air; that is to say, ideas and information, knowledge and wisdom stored in the fixed air of The Cloud and Matrix of the Net, downloadable for all, and, ever increasingly, artificially intelligent in nature.
Intelligence, like nourishing water from the Aquarian Water Bearer, is dispersed in streams; conversations are held together by virtual threads, such as on Twitter or in electronic mail. The New Jerusalem Gates refer to these concepts with physical threads sewn across the base of the dye sublimation prints, with dangling extensions through the body of the frame itself, as if the work could be plugged into the network. Indeed, it is one’s imagination that is the force that activates the dialogue around the work.
Further anchoring the exhibition, Quetzalcoatl’s Shield is an homage to another mythological figure of Air, the Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, the “civilizing hero” of Mesoamerican culture, as described by archaeologist Graham Hancock. Teotihuacan’s Pyramid of the Sun is transformed and adorned with royal, radiating bands of gold, blue, and black marker fields across the photographic picture plane. The marker technique utilized here across the surface of the Shield portals suggest a simple magnification of Quantum energy and QFT (Quantum Field Theory); vibrational energy that ripples and flows like water across all fields, connecting all consciousness, matter, and light.
Slater Bradley (b. 1975, San Francisco) is a conceptual and cross-disciplinary artist, who works with a wide variety of media, including photography, drawing, painting, neon and video. Bradley began exhibiting internationally at the age of 22, and in 2005, at the age of 30, Bradley became the youngest male artist to present a solo show at The Guggenheim. Bradley’s work is represented in several museum collections, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, New York, and the Zabludowicz Collection, London.
