Ry David Bradley | Unvalley Valley

About

By using the network to access global locations that show little else than the swaying of trees, the occasional car, or person walking past, the scenes are evocative of the landscape genre in painting, yet brokered through the contemporary paradigm of surveillance. Unless something dramatic happens, the recording is rewritten in digital memory cycles. Tiny narratives for that day are lost. 

Ruminating on this passage of time and it’s relationship to landscape painting, Bradley has embellished these pastoral and interior scenes with multiple facets, where each work contains the exact day, month, hour, minute and second the landscape was seen.

In a parallel body of work Bradley has made a series of digital portraits that combines the clichés of 20th century abstraction with WWII techniques for naval camouflage. This is as a means to ensure the privacy of the subjects, photographed live via an app called Periscope. The technology allows anyone to view the front facing camera of a person’s smartphone camera with precise GPS global location. A sea of faces look back at each other, posing, performing. It is a thought that may horrify some while others are addicted to the thrill of being seen, desperate for more followers, more audience, more comments, more likes, more hearts. The relationship between the fear of total transparency against what is now perceived to be the privilege of privacy is perhaps one of the most important and defining issues of our time. 

Bradley continues a longstanding investigation of the 21st century painting. High contrast renders are achieved through a process of heating dyes onto the textured surface of suede, adding a layer of spray paint cast over the digital source. Rich hues often unobtainable by anything but the chromatic intensity of a screen, or of paint itself, sit alongside both of these in a process Bradley has slowly developed over many years of investigation.                                                                                                                                                 Ry David Bradley (b.1979, Melbourne) lives and works in New York City and Melbourne. Graduating in 2013 from MFA, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University, Bradley has exhibited internationally including LA, London, New York, Berlin, Brussels, Milan, Cologne, Sydney and Melbourne. His work has recently been added to the permanent collection of the Victoria Museum in Melbourne.