Slater Bradley
[citation needed] Bradley launched his career with his first solo show titled The Fried Liver Attack, named after the chess gambit which sacrifices the knight, at Team Gallery in 2000.
[5] By 2004, Slater Bradley was considered a "rising younger artist",[6] having held a solo exhibition in 2003 at the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum at Bard College and being included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial with the video Theory and Observation which critic Jerry Saltz described as one of "the most ravishing works in the show".
"[11] Later, in 2001, during the show Trompe le Monde at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris, Bradley reintroduced the concept in a video installation featuring “Slater” waking up in his apartment and walking out into New York City.
[citation needed] In 2002, during the show Here are the Young Men at Team Gallery, Bradley presented the work Factory Archives (2002), which would later become the first of three videos in the acclaimed Doppelganger Trilogy (also including Phantom Release (2003) and Recorded Yesterday (2004)).
Spector continues: “two by suicide and one by a protracted descent into disrepute—these figures are perceived through the distancing lens of desire and memory.”[12] Slater Bradley explicitly situates his work in the context of the fandom surrounding these three fallen heroes, which he summons from the dead.
"[13] Each chapter of the trilogy appears both worn and overexposed, as if distorted by age, or, as described by Paul Fleming in his essay from the Lifetime Achievement Award, “As if secretly documenting a sliver of time, the images have a home video quality: wobbly, slightly out-of-focus (…) like a memory slipping away.” [14] The three video works featured recordings of a faux concert performances, such as in Factory Archives (2002), where Curtis, lead singer of the punk band Joy Division, is depicted as an elusive performer just before the dawn of MTV.
[citation needed] The video installations blend the widely recognizable drumbeat from Led Zeppelin “When The Levee Braks”, performed by Bradley’s doppelganger, with a surprise appearance by the Cal football team, entering the stadium to practice.
In 2010, Bradley held an exhibition at the Whitney Museum in collaboration with Academy Award nominated cinematographer Edward Lachman, whose best known films include Far from Heaven, Erin Brockovich, and The Virgin Suicides.
In a further twist, Ben Brock, who plays Phoenix as the widower and previously portrayed “The Doppelganger”, makes the installation a triple portrait of the actor, the cinematographer, and the artist, blurring the lines between illusion and reality, past and future.
[citation needed] A theme of the "lost woman," an idea sourced chiefly from Chris Marker's film La Jetée, became central to Bradley’s work after the completion of Shadow.
His video, entitled she was my la jetée premiered on Nowness.com on April 5, 2013 and was shown soon after in an eponymous exhibition at Galería Helga de Alvear in Madrid, Spain as well as part of Sequoia: Recent Work by Slater Bradley at Cornell University's Johnson Museum of Art.
In a parallel investigation, Bradley was at work on a lifelike copper casting of his high school baseball glove, revisiting the Salingerian themes found in his 2009–2011 video, don't let me disappear.
The first of these, "The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls" brings to life a familiar character from Catcher in the Rye, a boy in the habit of inscribing verses of poetry, selections from William Blake, John Keats and Robert Browning, across his firstbaseman's glove.
[citation needed]To share the learnings from his encounters with transcendence, Bradley co-founded a project space with Johannes Fricke Waldhausen in Munich called Goodroom where he exhibited and offered natal chart readings in December 2015.
The show considered the increasingly complex human relationship with screens, objects that have evolved to function as dual representations of both “the rational and the dreamlike.” True Faith, an exhibition curated by Matthew Higgs and Jon Savage with the collaboration of archivist Johan Kugelberg in Manchester, England, was part of a 2017 city-wide arts festival commissioned to celebrate the music of Joy Division and explore their continuing cultural impact as a powerful inspiration to visual artists.
Bradley’s photograph Factory Icon from 2000, portraying the artist’s doppelganger as Ian Curtis, was re-worked in the proportions of the golden rectangle and featured on the cover of the exhibition catalogue as well as displayed on banners hung throughout the city.
As noted by Adrian Seattle writing for The Guardian, "in this work, it is not Ian Curtis on stage at all, but a double (Bradley’s other Doppelganger video portraits portray Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson).
It is a mystical work about spiritual ascension, and in the words of John Major Jenkins, the "journey up through the planetary spheres of the ecliptic to the door of the Most High, the Sol Invictus, the Eighth Gate, the realm of the Hypercosmic Sun."
Bradley exhibited his series of D8S paintings which play off the geometrics of astrological charts from chosen moments in time inspired by birthdates, founding fathers, origin stories pulled from the past and future.
But “can The Artist, as an archetype, connect our secular contemporary realities to a more transcendental awareness that incorporates our ancient wisdoms, systems, and even prophecies?”[22] In eight digital photographs transferred onto two-meter-high canvases, the gates of Jerusalem’s Old City Wall are depicted as monumental edifices with visible everyday features like parked cars and graffiti.
