TIME OUT NEW YORK — Slater Bradley “Here are the Young Men” by Martha Schwendener

When it formed in 1976, Joy Division became a touchstone of post-punk, young-adult, (mostly male) angst. Named after the women in the Nazi concentration camps who were set aside for sexual slavery, the band created some of the most dirgelike music since 18th-century Puritan hymns. The death by hanging lead singer Ian Curtis on May 18,1980, only magnified the band’s gloomy aura. 

In tandem with the current mania for all things late- 70’s and early-80’s, there’s been a resurgence of interest in Joy Division among musicians and artsy young dudes like Slater Bradley. His currect show takes its title for a video of Joy Division shows at the Apollo Theater in Manchester, England. Among the works here that address the band directly is a wall painting replication the cover design of “Here are the Young Men,” as well as a murky video in a rear gallery that apparenctly feature the doomed Crutis at the microphone. 

Most of the show, however, is dominated by another motif: the doppelganger. Bradley includes a series of phootgraphs of a friend who, in a manner that evokes the notion of a ghostly alter ego, looks like the artist. Each image features this person in a different pose: leaning, bereft, against a tree wound with Christmas lights; dosing alone on a train; and stading in a graveyard on a headstone with BRADLEY spelled out in low relief.