Legendary curator Chrissie Iles' fifteen page meditation on the totality of Slater Bradley's Doppelganger project from the catalogue Slater Bradley and Ed Lachman: Look Up and Stay in Touch.

In the early 1920's, towards the end of his life, Claude Monet stood on the Japanese bridge over the ornamental water lily pond in his garden at Giverny and took a photograph of his shadow. His head, wearing a hat, can be seen reflected in the surface of the water, barely visible at the periphery of the black-and-white photograph's bottom edge. The ghostly presence of the artist in Monet's enigmatic self-portrait anticipates Slater Bradley's doppelganger project eighty years later, in which the double operates as a mechanism through which to interrogate the transience and permeability of identity. 

As Holden Caulfield walks the streets of New York City on his way to a nervous breakdown in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, he finds himself, each time he’s about to step off a curb, beseeching his deceased little brother, “Allie, don’t let me disappear.” In his excellent video Don’t Let Me Disappear (2009–11, 10½ minutes), the sole work in his recent show at Team, Slater Bradley employs his longtime doppelgänger, the dreamy model and actor Benjamin Brock, to represent Caulfield wandering modern-day Midtown Manhattan. Sound and image come together in ways that are funny and ominous to depict a young man on the edge.

...his newest videos, Sequoia and She Was My la Jetée, both works 2013, which continue to explore haunting cultural presences by conjuring up idealized female figures. Shown on three screens, these women blur the boundaries between memory, fiction, and obsession, drawing the viewer in while they remain distant and unattainable.

The two loops are projected on two separate screens in the space, yet their subjects seem to cross and coalesce into an impossible single female character before the viewer. Outside the screening area, Alina is depicted in photo-drawings that are surrounded in gold and black markings that resemble tree rings–unavoidable traces linear time. 

So this issue coming up is about fantasy. What's your personal fantasy at this moment?

To be able to move objects with my energy, telekinetically. And then you know, live happily ever after in Berlin. I really want a kid, and that's a great place to have children. Hopefully I can meet the right one and settle down.

There can be little doubt that artists like Bradley, Adelman, and other are at the forefront of a cultural movement that embraces the use of what were once thought of as esoteric techniques for enhancing their creative lives. Yet Bradley thinks they are part of something even bigger.

"I think there's a neo-spiritual art movement happening," (Bradley) says. "At a certain point the truth is a bigger subject than pop culture. With meditation, you find your inner peace, your inner truth, your centered truth, and then you find the world, and the world finds its center. That's a noble pursuit for art these days."

It's better to burn out than fade away. 

                                                                                                 -Kurt Cobain, 1994

And the rest is rust and stardust.

                                                                                                 -Vladimir Nabokov

Up close, the stillness dissolves, or is troubled: the painting consists of thousands of small hatch marks, short vertical stokes made in horizontal bands, applied in what the artist has described as a kind of meditative gesture. The experience I had viewing it was something like love, what the French call a coup de foudre, a thunderbolt, and I knew I wanted to feel its effect again and again; I knew that it was something that would be, in some way I didn't fully understand, useful to me. And so, thanks to haggling, a drawn-out schedule of payments generously accepted by the gallery, and the forbearance of my partner, it now hangs behind my desk, where I can feel it almost buzzing as I work.

6. In 2003, Slater Bradley created a photographic work titled after Nirvana's single, "I Hate Myself and Want to Die". When Kurt Cobain wrote this nihilistic song, he intentionally played into the stereotypical image imposed on him by the mass media, imbuing the song with an implicit message. Slater Bradley used this title to recreate the imagery associated with Cobain, adding an additional layer of meta-perfomativity. Twenty years later, this work was included in the exhibition Memory Palace in Ruins. For this occasion, the artist made a significant revision, presenting it to the public for the first time with the new title, "I Love Myself and Want to Live".