Slater Bradley

Slater Bradley (born 1975 in San Francisco, California) is a conceptual and cross-disciplinary artist, typically working in thematic series and installations.

In his video works, Bradley often combines footage of real events, soundtracks drawn from classical and contemporary music as well as references to literary, scientific, or historical works.

In his most recent work, Bradley manipulates photographic material by using markers and eliminating backgrounds as well as removing known icons from their time and place.

Bradley was dubbed the "unintended king of serendipity" by curator Heidi Zuckerman as well as “something of a cult hero” by Anne Stringfield of The New Yorker.

He has exhibited collaborative work with Ed Lachman at the Aspen Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He graduated from San Francisco University High School in 1993 and earned a B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1998, where he received the Lillian Levenson Scholarship.

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.

He gained notoriety at 25 with his second solo show Charlatan, also at Team Gallery, which displayed his "real flair for capturing emotional moments".

The show featured the video work The Laurel Tree (Beach) (2000) with actress Chloë Sevigny standing on a cloudy beach reciting Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger (1903).

Sevigny's “uninflected manner” is particularly pared down as the speech she delivers happens to be incredibly loaded, as described in a review by Frieze Magazine: "For, after all, what more pitiable sight is there than life led astray by art? We artists have a consummate contempt for the dilettante, the man who is leading a living life and yet thinks he can be an artist too if he gets half the chance."The show also featured the works Female Gargoyle.

and JFK Jr.

The first being an “amateur video” of a tattooed woman balancing dangerously on the corner of a roof.

Here, “a female gargoyle come to life, who, it seems, is engulfed by a life-and-death decision”, but the work never reveals the fate of the gargoyle.

In JFK Jr., Slater Bradley reflects on “the culture of loss and remembrance”.

The video follows a young girl placing a flower at a memorial outside of the deceased’s apartment, and “the camera’s myopic gaze seems to comment on the mythological, almost narcissistic grief we are willing to shed for those we never knew”.

“Alluding to images of science and history, as well as an already past future referenced in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bradley’s film evokes unspoken connections between imagination and fact.”

It was at the Charlatan show, Slater Bradley introduced the concept of “The Doppelganger” – as in ‘one who goes twice’ – with his photographic work My Doppelganger as Ian Curtis in a Charlatan Pose (Cigarette) as the postcard for the show.' Here, Bradley began passing off photographs of his double, portrayed by model Benjamin Brock (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Bradley himself), as though they were images of himself.' In a review of Charlatan, critic Roberta Smith offers the statement "It is a declaration of artistic intent that makes one eager to see what Mr. Bradley will do next."

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.

The seminal concept of The Doppelganger continued to be woven into Bradley's work in the following years.

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)).' The trilogy revolves around the subject of "recycled illusions that are the reality of pop culture"' and conjures up three pop icons, Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain and Michael Jackson, described by Nancy Spector, curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, as “fallen heroes”.

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.” Slater Bradley explicitly situates his work in the context of the fandom surrounding these three fallen heroes, which he summons from the dead.

Bradley describes Ian Curtis – the subject/ object of Factory Archives (2002) – as a “cult hero” and explains how: “[the Nirvana video] Phantom Release links itself directly to the fans,” bringing together “images and performances culled and homogenized from my memories of MTV, concert documentaries, magazine covers, Saturday Night Live, and three concerts I had seen in San Francisco”; and says, of Michael Jackson, who is represented in Recorded Yesterday (2004): “He was my first introduction into the realm of the rock star and with it, the worship factor."

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.”  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.

It is unclear, who is the doppelganger in Bradley’s trilogy: “Benjamin Brock is neither simply playing Slater Bradley nor is he merely assuming the role of these cultural icons.

Rather, Brock plays Bradley playing each of these modern mythological figures populating our media saturated collective unconsciousness”.

With this, “Bradley transforms the doppelganger into a tripleganger”.

The images themselves are familiar when Bradley, through Brock, produces new recordings or even a second history.

However, the recordings never feature Bradley himself, but his double – and always at a distance.

“One never sees Bradley, one never sees Curtis, Cobain, or Jackson.

There is only Brock, who is all of them and none of them.”

By 2004, Slater Bradley was considered a "rising younger artist", 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".

The video contemplates the relationship between reason and faith and features close-ups of a youth choir in the cathedral of Notre-Dame.

The work “stunningly capture states of gawkiness and anxiety in kids whose singing channels divinity” as described by the art critic Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker

In 2004, Bradley showed at the Museum of Modern Art's Premieres and exhibited the Doppelganger Trilogy at the Los Angeles gallery Blum & Poe.

In 2005, at the age of 30, Bradley became the youngest artist to have a solo show at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Slater Bradley was born and raised in San Francisco, California.

In 2005, Bradley was awarded by the NASA Art Program, and produced the video work Dark Night of the Soul (2005-2006) in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History.

The work portrays an astronaut walking through the galleries of the American Museum of Natural History in New York to the re-recording of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”, performed on a flute.

The lone character explores representations of Earth and outer space as if visiting a strange new world.