Theory and Observation: New Work by Slater Bradley

THREE EXHIBITIONS WILL BE ON VIEW AT THE CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES MUSEUM, BARD COLLEGE, FROM JUNE 29 TO SEPTEMBER 7

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.—The Center for Curatorial Studies Museum at Bard College will present three exhibitions this summer: Theory and Observation: New Work by Slater Bradley; a video installation, Untitled by Aïda Ruilova; and Sodium Dreams, an exhibition exploring the relationship between cinema and the city with artists from the United States and Europe. Free bus transportation from New York City to the opening on Sunday, June 29, is available on a limited basis. The exhibitions will be on view at the museum from Sunday, June 29, through Sunday, September 7.

The exhibition Theory and Observation: New Work by Slater Bradley includes the U.S. premiere of New York artist Bradley’s 2002 video installation of the same title. Bradley’s video works often combine footage of real events, soundtracks drawn from classical and contemporary music and references to literary, scientific, or historical works. The results are glimpses of unexpected moments of poetry in observed life. Theory and Observation brings Stephen Hawkings together with footage of a choir filmed furtively from the back of the cathedral of Notre Dame, and a musical soundtrack composed by the Replikants. Also on view will be a series of 60 color photographs Bradley took between 1997 and 2003. In these images, Bradley isolates the small events and intimate moments that punctuate daily life. Accompanying the exhibition is a book designed by the artist with reproductions of these photographs. Bradley studied at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Berlin, and Geneva, and his work has been included in recent exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany; the National Museum of Film, Television, and Photography in the U.K.; and P.S. 1 in New York City. Theory and Observation is a new acquisition of the Marieluise Hessel Collection on permanent loan to the Center for Curatorial Studies.
  • THE NEW YORKER — WHAT’S NEW: The Whitney Biennial by Peter Schjeldahl
  • March 22, 2004

  • The new Whitney Biennial is startlingly good. It is better–more serious, more pleasureable–than anyone, perhaps even the curators, Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, could have expected, given the general exhaustion and incoherence of the past decade and a half in art. Essay in the show's catalogue impose the usual theories and exhortations, but the artists largely elude them. All of a sudden, artists are again plainly smarter in their bones than art intellectuals in their brains. The operative work is "plainly."

    Video installation is now a fully mature and independent art form that synthesizes aspects of narrative and documentary film, painting, sculpture, and decoration in real space and time. Craigie Horsfield enchants with a four-walled projection of a misty forest in the Canary Islands. Watching it, you have an experience that would be more transporting only if it included getting chilled and wet. (Also spiritually touristic is Roni Horn's distribution, throughout the museum of sumptuous photographs of a beautiful boy, hieratic birds, and gloomy icebergs, all from Iceland.) Slater Bradley's closeups of a youth choir in the cathedral of Notre-Dame stunningly capture states of gawkiness and anxiety in kids who singing channels divinity.

     
  • THE VILLAGE VOICE — THE OK CORRAL by Jerry Saltz
  • March 17, 2004

  • After Owens and Peyton, the most ravishing works in this show are Yayoi Kusama's walk-in room of colored lights and Slater Bradley's video love song to the cosmos. 

    The art world is dying to like the 2004 Whitney Biennial. The opening was a love-fest. Previews in magazines and newspapers essentially implored, "Can't we all just get along and love the biennial?" Nearly all trotted out the cliché "the show everyone loves to hate." Disliking exhibitions is seen by some to be disloyal or obstructionist. This is traceable to the fact that in America today criticism and even civil disagreement are implicitly discouraged; people love ot hate or even demonize those whose views differ from their own. But, criticizing flawed exhibitions isn't hating them. It's a way of treating them with respect. Mostly, the good wishes for this show stem from the fact that everyone wants the Whitney to be great again. This OK Biennial is an excellent step.
  • THE NEW YORK TIMES — ART REVIEW; Video and Photographs That Teeter on the Edge by Benjamin Genocchio
  • August 17, 2003

  • Mr. Bradley, 28, has been slowly building a fan club for his casual, curbside snapshots. Purposely shorn of aesthetic concerns, they portray friends, family, lovers, his travels and day-to-day details of life as an artist in a messy modern metropolis. Together, they amount to a kind of Generation X "Remembrance of Things Past."

    Assembled by Amada Cruz, Mr. Bradley's exhibition contains an extended photographic essay and a video installation. The essay includes many tender and surprising images, among which are a number of pictures of whales decomposing on the shores of Ocean Beach in San Francisco. Seeing their endless, beached ranks is heartbreaking. 

    Many of the photographs contain a kind of primordial vitality. Partly it's the subject matter, with numerous shots of people sleeping, showering and eating, and partly the artist's carefree technique. Mr. Bradley belongs to the point-and-shoot school of photography, but he has a better eye than most. His photographs possess a rare, radiant humanity. 

    The closer you at the photographs, the greater your appreciation grows. The same goes for Mr. Bradley's video installation, "Theory and Observation" (2002). It was shot from the back of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris with a hand-held camera, the artist zooming in on the faces of choirboys rehearsing on stage. The images are set to the sound of the physicist Stephen Hawking talking about the origins of the universe and some other music. Religion collides with science in this piece, although it's done so gently neither gets hurt. 

ⓒ Slater B. Bradley 2024

Instagram Twitter Vimeo Icon-artsy
site managed with artbutler

Enquiry