For his first UK solo show Slater Bradley presents recent works including a major sculpture, video and photography that reflect Bradley’s obsession with ghosts and doppelgangers, artifice and actuality, death and its rituals. Nobody Gives a Fuck What you Go Do With Your Life is a show about the realisation that nobody but you can permanently affect the internal battles of the self or the search for identity.

Bradley’s sculpture of the same name features 2 life-size figures, one fashioned on the artist, the other on his doppelganger – a real life double repeatedly mistaken for Bradley in New York. Dressed as druidic chessboard figures the pair stand equal and opposite, rivals to each other’s space.

Also in the show are photographs where the artist appears as a ghost image to his doppelganger’s ‘real’ presence in a cemetery that marks Bradley’s grave, or the cemetery street named Bradley. These works represent the search for the lost self and the disconnection or failed communication between self and shadow, real and ghost worlds. In a video work the doppelganger takes the place of Bradley’s idealised double - Ian Curtis, the dark romantic singer of Joy Division, and 80s pioneer of melancholic punk with gothic overtones. Ghost is the incidental footage caught on a security camera of the doppelganger leaving a museum following his performance as Curtis’ ghost.

JFK Jr is a 3-minute video filmed the day after the plane-crash death of John F Kennedy Jr and his wife. One of a series of impromptu video recordings of real life dramas, it follows a teenage girl queuing at a makeshift shrine outside the couple’s loft. About to place her note and flowers, she senses Bradley’s gaze and turns to look into the camera, confused and self-conscious, realising she herself has become the object of media scrutiny. She drops the flowers and the action loops, condemned by the structure of video she returns again and again token in hand to mourn a god she does not know. ‘We feel a tremendous pain with death. It’s safer to go through the motions. Experiencing the death of a public figure such as JFK is almost a dress rehearsal for one’s own death.’ (SB)

Most of Bradley’s work deals with falling in love – with the other, with idols – and the necessary loss of ego in the search for true identity. His work is characterised by a sense of longing, of existing between two states, craving the other yet afraid the self will disappear.

And the pool answered, “But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw ever my own beauty mirrored.” (The Disciple, Oscar Wilde)

Bradley has had solo show in a number of galleries internationally, and at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (catalogue) 2002; P.S.1, Long Island City, NY, Special Projects Series and Art Basel, Switzerland, Statements. He has also shown many group shows including Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany, Recent Acquisitions (forthcoming); Fondazione Pitti Immagine, Florence, Italy, The Fourth Sex: The Extreme People of Adolescence (curated by Francesco Bonami and Raf Simons); Smart Project Space, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Someone to Watch Over Me (curated by Thomas Peutz and Una Henry); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium, Casino 2001 (curated by Jeanne Greenberg Rohaytn, with catalogue); Kunsthaus Meran-Merano Arte, Merano, Italy, Art and Wellbeing - The Aesthetics of Recreation (curated by Andrea Domesle, with catalogue); Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, Schau mir in die Augen, Kleines! (curated by Rene Block, with catalogue); National Museum of Film, Television and Photography, West Bradford, UK, In a Lonely Place (curated by Greg Hobson, with catalogue).