V1 GALLERY PROUDLY PRESENTS
I, Like a Record
A solo exhibition by Shane Bradford
Hi Jesper
Well, what can I say? …It revolves around the double meaning of the word 'record' of course...I, LIKE A RECORD. I wanted to say that each person is the sum of their experience and even though the experience may be the same, the way it is experienced will be different. Take ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’...everyone knows it (well almost) and yet it is personal to each.
It reminds me of when I did a show in a massive ex-soviet museum in Lithuania years back - I went with a friend and we were treated with great hospitality and kindness until, that is, we got onto the subject of Pink Floyd's ‘The Wall’. They asked us '…did we know it?' 'Yes, of course we knew it, Pink Floyd are English after all...' That comment was met, somewhat to our surprise, with incredulity and even anger, 'No' they said, 'The Wall is OUR album, when the iron curtain was coming down, and in Berlin etc The Wall was EVERYTHING to us, you have no idea about The Wall!' Or something like that. I thought 'Fuck you. You can't lay claim to a mass produced album for your own, especially one that sold 30 million+!' But now I think fair enough, take it. It can be your very own and everybody else's too.
The paint seals the albums, entombing, masking, preserving, hiding, whatever, my personal experience of each. No one will know, or really care what each one has meant for me although I can assure you each is dear to my heart! Painting them this way, in what has evolved to become this absurd signature style of dipping, reasserts my individuality on them for a moment before being reborn as everyone's again. It's just a way of saying I AM HERE - the same as everyone else, and different, and also confronting the untouchably epic scale of something like ‘Abbey Road’ by rendering it defunct, it makes a little space for the ME...I know Jesper, sad but true...
The sand sculpture attempts a similar comparison of the personal versus the epic. It is a faux geological record, spanning only a week...7 layers, 7 days. Its value is questionable I admit... I felt that because this was a project space, a sculpture that was speculative rather than authoritative would be appropriate. I don't know if it has any merit at all and if it does, I would suggest it derives from the way it records my increasing ability to manipulate and work the sand from the bottom up, and nothing more. In this way it records in microcosm the idea of EVOLUTION itself, which is cosmic in scale! ....But by contrast on a mundane, everyday kind of level. So in the end the message is simple; in the cosmos of the 'self' things have a remarkable quality of being infinite and insignificant simultaneously. That is something that is not supposed to happen in the real world. That's all I wanted to say really.
Thanks
Shane
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Shane Bradford, born London UK 1971, is very well known for his drip works. He dips various objects (books, records and array of common objects) in multi colored emulsions, a process that can take up to a year, until they look like abstract mutations. Objects loose their function in the process and gain new meanings. Bradford’s humoristic wanderlust and socio political eye for the ironic paradoxes in modern society also extends to media such as film and large-scale installations. He has exhibited extensively, current and recent exhibitions include; The Hole, New York, Campbell Works, London, Boetzelaer Nispen Gallery, Amsterdam. In 2007 he won the distinguished Celeste Art Prize.
