Max Wigram Gallery is proud to present a second solo exhibition by New York-based artist Slater Bradley. In A Mixed State features the recent work of the artist, which continues Bradley’s fictional construction around his own imaginary autobiography and cult figures he admires.

The film My Conclusion / My Necessity (2006) rotates around the symbolic burial of the discontinuation of the famous Super 8 Kodachrome in the equally renowned Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. The sense of mourning for a cinematographic medium which a history loaded with memory and the past, blends in with the ritualized mourning around Oscar Wilde’s grave. There the artist meets a young Danish girl called Ida, accompanied by her family who are visiting the graveyard. The soundtrack is Arboretum (1993) by the artist’s favourite band Unwound. This accompanies Bradley’s personal conclusion of a time in his life, bringing with it the necessity to reinvent himself.

The new body of photographs in the exhibition present the man Bradley has identified as his doppelganger, his friend Benjamin Brock. The new series of photos represent an “acted out” life as opposed to real life. Set in Tokyo, they foreshadow another stage of the Doppelganger’s existence: his suicidal breakdown. Their dark atmospheres recall travelogue pictures, and mask a sense of fall. The photos look at the possibility of what’s left after a trial, such as the transformation of the self. Staged as performed acts whose structures correspond to those articulating contemporary life and culture, Bradley’s narratives play with the notion of myth and respond to the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of heroes’ activities as a way to comprise the ethics of artistic creation and experience of the actual world (Toward a Philosophy of the Act, 1986).

Born in 1975 in San Francisco, Bradley lives and works in New York, USA. As a recipient of the 2006 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in Video (USA), recent solo exhibitions include The Doppelganger Trilogy (2005) at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York). Group shows include, among others, Youth of Today (2006), Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt a/M); The Gravity of Art (2005), De Appel Foundation (Amsterdam); Superstars – The Principle of Renown (2005), Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna) and the 2004 Whitney Biennial (New York). His works have been acquired by MOCA (Los Angeles), MOMA (New York), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York) and Whitney Museum of American Art (New York).