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“Painting is an alternative to pop culture, not its accomplice.” I create work that reacts to the razzle dazzle and hustle and bustle of now, that takes us away from the abrasive static of the moment, instead creating the stasis of forever. The visual culture within the world we live demands consistent change, rapid movement, constant show and flash. One neither takes the necessary time to contemplate nor enjoy a moment of silence, a “still” image. My work is a reaction to our visually hurried culture. A dwelling designed for grand scale and vast marketability is reduced to a isolated minute carving in the wall. Television advertisements are transformed from attention grabbing sales campaigns to barely noticeable shifts on a white monochrome canvas. A film is created, not with fast paced action sequences, but with solely the most ignored product of the process, film grain. The work, in turn, becomes calming, quiet and at times melancholic, it responds optically and sometimes sonically to the chaotic, cluttered and overwhelming imagery of our time.
“...the work of David Bradberry suggests the blank screen of cinematic representation, open to our own projections. Dust and Echoes (2008), blank 8mm film projected onto a triptych of white canvases, suggests a painting in motion that employes the most basic element of cinema: light. From this non-representational play of decaying celluloid and light, a horizon line appears, suggesting a faint landscape through which the viewer is moving. This illusion of motion, most characteristic of the cinema, expresses remnants of our desire to read representational forms, even in abstract cinema images. In the era of digital video and photography, Bradberry’s work seems to join with the growing number of artists whose work uses celluloid as a medium melancholic for the materiality of cinema. In the cinematic body, we find residue of memory and the haunting imprint of time. The play of light in these paintings in motion is reminiscent of the later works of Stan Brakhage, experiments with light and celluloid that attempted to illustrate the potentials of film to express matter is a manner not available to the human eye. His other paintings also draw on cinematic tradition, using focused and intense light to illuminate a specific element in a landscape of darkness. He uses an extreme high-key chiaroscuro effect reminiscent of the techniques developed by the cinema of German Expressionism and also the traditional renaissance painting. Here Bradberry succeeds in both obfuscating and revealing information within a scene.” |
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