Slater Bradley
she was my la jetée (still), 2013
Video: B/W and sound
Courtesy of the artist and Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid
SLATER BRADLEY
she was my la jetée
19 September - 2 November 2013
Galería Helga de Alvear opens the new exhibition programme with the American artist Slater Bradley who returns to Madrid to represent his latest work she was my la jeteé, a personal remake of the cult film La Jeteé (1962) by his idol Chris Marker, one of the best known experimental filmmakers of the 20th century. In this work – filmed with Super 8 and HD – Bradley creates an idealised portrait of an unachievable woman. In addition, the exhibiton contains a series of photographs that represent the same archetypical pattern of an ideal woman as in La Jeteé.
Slater Bradley, (San Francisco, USA, 1975) lives and works in Berlin, Germany
For almost fifteen years Slater Bradley has been producing a unique oeuvre through which he has explored his own biography and that of the generation to which he belongs. Resorting to doubles and shadows, on the one hand, and to the painful fantasy of youth idols, on the other, he has created a corpus of work that hovers between the genres of video and photography.
His career focuses on the theory of the subject, the conditionings of patterns and their performative possibilities that continue to fascinate many young artists intent on unravelling the identity of those of their day and age. But while so many others centre their efforts on the critical destruction of the gestures and attitudes of juvenile heroes, Slater Bradley bases his work on the memento mori, "remember you shall die".
The fact is that all his heroes have died young: Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis and Michael Jackson are embodied in Benjamin Brock, whom Bradley met at a disco in New York in 1999 when he was twenty-four and who became his doppelgänger - a term first used by German Romantic Jean Paul to refer to the phantasmagorical image of one who "walks beside us", our darker self, considered by Strindberg an omen of death.
The game of mirrors between Bradley the artist, Brock the double, and the youth culture idols portrayed examines, in the artist's own words, "the psychological effects of idolatry, mimicry and the collective unconscious in the formation of the teenager identity of a specific generation: my own."
Galería Helga de Alvear
Doctor Fourquet, 12
28012 Madrid
Spain
T: 0034 91 468 05 06
Galería Helga de Alvear
Read On... Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid
