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SEQUOIA Recent Work by Slater Bradley

Sunday, December 22, 2013 at 10:00am to 5:00pm

Johnson Museum of Art
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 114 Central Ave, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

Slater Bradley is perhaps best known for his Doppelgänger Trilogy from the early 2000s, a melancholic series that explored the mythology of images and the cult of celebrity. Questioning notions of authenticity, the artist cast his own spitting image, model Benjamin Brock, to impersonate Ian Curtis, Michael Jackson, and Kurt Cobain in performances that viewers assumed were acted by Bradley himself.

Making their premieres at the Johnson Museum, Bradley’s new videos Sequoia and she was my la jetée elaborate on these chains of reflections. Channeling Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) they similarly blur the boundaries between truth and fiction, dwelling on memory and obsession. By alternating his 2006 single-channel video My Conclusion/My Necessity with she was my la jetée, the two bodies of work seem to merge, reflecting each other while blending into one. For the earlier piece, Bradley convinced a mother and daughter to reenact how they put on lipstick and kiss Oscar Wilde’s tombstone in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. While the videos continue Bradley’s interest in the sometimes tragic fan-idol relationship, this coming-of-age video is also a symbol for life’s confrontation with death.

This theme is also a major aspect of Bradley’s recent large-scale photo-drawings, featuring his muse Alina—also the protagonist in the two new videos—surrounded by obsessive gold and silver marks simulating tree rings. Recalling the famous scene in Vertigo shot at Big Basin Redwoods State Park, where Kim Novak shows Jimmy Stewart on a cross-section of a giant sequoia tree when she was born and when she died, the videos and photo-drawings set into motion the never-ending circle of doomed desire and longing.

Bradley was born in San Francisco in 1975. He has had many solo exhibitions, including most recently at the Aspen Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In 2005 he received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in Video. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum, among many others. He is represented by Max Wigram Gallery in London, Blum & Poe in Los Angeles, and Galería Helga de Alvear in Madrid.

This exhibition was curated by Andrea Inselmann, curator of modern and contemporary art and photography at the Johnson Museum, and supported in part by the Ames Exhibition Endowment.

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Event Type

Exhibit

Departments

Johnson Museum of Art

Website

http://museum.cornell.edu/exhibitions...

Cost

Free

Contact Phone

607 255-6464