PHILIPPE BRADSHAW
Chains and Videos
Curators Essay
From video art and the Mona Lisa, to driving dance club music and a
staid museum setting, British video artist Philippe Bradshaw re-examines traditional
perception and environmental settings in "Chains and Videos," his
first solo museum exhibition in the U.S.
The focal point of the exhibition, made from anodized aluminum chains, is
Bradshaw’s Three Blind Mice in a Superstore hanging sublime unique work
(2001), the artist's personal rendition of Leonardo daVinci's Mona Lisa. Bradshaw's
15-foot by 10-foot curtain of dangling chains hangs from the gallery ceiling
like a massive beaded or macramé room divider evoking hippie culture
of the late 1960s and early 70s. Onto this surface, the artist projects an
enigmatic video image, which is broken by the chains into an almost pixilated,
computer-generated surface.
In creating his chain installations, Bradshaw appropriates and reconstructs
imagery from art historical periods as diverse as the Italian Renaissance
and the American Pop Art movement of the 60s. The images he ultimately chooses
are immediately recognizable works by well-known artists subjected to intense
media and scholarly attention. These so-called untouchable “icons”
of the art world carry historic weight and are the scale by which other artists
are measured. The artist's presentation of these icons in his chosen medium
of metal chain with projected video is not as an attempt to mock the originals;
rather, the use of these icons is an attempt to bring the original work into
a new light through reinterpretation.
Bradshaw's visual interpolations allow these art historic images to escape
their original historical significance and status. His utilization of personal
portraits humanizes and contemporizes their subjects. For example, his projected
image of a young nude woman dressed in metal chain material on a chain curtain
emblazoned with the Mona Lisa can be viewed as a contemporary recreation of
a classic portrait sitting. The young woman is shown posing in Bradshaw's
studio, her image captured forever in the medium of art -- in this case, video.
Whereas the original Mona Lisa represents an exact moment frozen in time,
Bradshaw's young woman becomes a series of moments caught over a twelve-minute
period; through unrehearsed movement, the viewer is better able to understand
the artist's never-ending quest to capture the elusive "perfect moment."
In Trampoline (2001), Bradshaw addresses movement in a slightly different
manner. Instead of creating movement through the use of a projected image,
the artist has elected to create movement within the image itself. Once again
using his signature anodized aluminum chain -- this time as a backdrop in
his own studio, rather than as a projection backdrop in the gallery -- Bradshaw
enters the work directly; his active participation in the work transmutes
the piece into performance, which is captured by a video camera filming his
actions and interactions. In the resulting video, he is surrounded by the
chain-defined image as he and a female companion, both nude, take turns jumping
on a trampoline.
Bradshaw affords viewers a chance to think not only about the familiar art
imagery directly in front of them, but about the art-making process as well.
Through his use of iconic imagery in an iconoclastic way, Bradshaw also focuses
us on the element of chance that inevitably plays a part in the making of
a masterpiece.
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