TAB Event - Slater Bradley "Perfect Empathy"

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At Taka Ishii Gallery
Media: Photography, Art Party

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Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition with New York-based artist Slater Bradley. Born and educated in California, Bradley has exhibited his work on an international scale; a selection of the artist’s solo museum exhibitions includes the Frans Hals Museum (Netherlands), the Museum of Contemporary Art in St. Louis (St. Louis), the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), and the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard College (New York).

Slater Bradley gained early recognition for a series of film and photographic works known collectively as "the Doppelganger Trilogy". While Bradley produced a considerable body of successful work outside this series, the Trilogy combined the artist’s formal and personal interests in imagery culled from pop and sub-popular culture in a manner that appealed to a broad audience; the culmination of which was Bradley’s solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, at the early age of 30. In the Trilogy, Bradley himself is played by his collaborator/doppelganger Benjamin Brock, while Bradley's alter ego Brock also plays various doomed celebrities (Ian Curtis from Joy Division, Kurt Cobain from Nirvana, and Michael Jackson). Such portraits thereby undergo a double transfiguration and are deftly captured in Bradley's video and photographic work. In his recent work, the level of transfiguration decreases, bringing himself closer to his portrait.

"Perfect Empathy" consists of a series of female nude photographs on which Bradley has drawn over with a silver marker pen. As a follow-up to the series entitled "Golden" (photographs of celebrity figures from the artist’s archive painted in gold with marker pen), "Perfect Empathy" draws upon the element of identification that exists between an idol and his or her audience - in this case, a coterie of young women and Bradley himself. Leaving behind the doppelganger concept, this new series remains within the realm of self-portraiture.

[Image: "Perfect Empathy" (2007) silver marker on C-print, 152 x 102cm Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery and Team]

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