Dove Bradshaw

Tekst by David Frakel

Dove Bradshaw has an abiding attraction to contradiction. She has consistently made works that counterpose opposites in such a way as to make them point somewhere else. Bradshaw describes herself as “not a photo- grapher engaged with the mechanics of the camera or the darkroom” though it is a rare artist who would find himself making Da- guerreotypes, or figuring ways to transfer the qualities of those images into photogravures, large format film, or inkjet prints.

Most of the images are black and white, though it is more fitting to say they’re black, with a matte richness that Bradshaw repeatedly looks for and finds in that tone. The impression is of a dense black field with areas of white, at times delicate and skel- etal defining an object or figure. This over- all somberness suits a recurring theme: the vanitas or memento mori—in life there is death and vice versa. Watermusic II (2005)

presents a skull and an egg, as distorted as the anamorphic skull in Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533), though made by the modern expe- dient of moving a Daguerreotype over the glass of a photocopier. Skulls reappear in You Skull See (2004), here doubled in a mirror that reflects the artist holding a skull, and in And so. And All. and They Were and Went (both 2004) which more simply make visual rhymes of skull and egg—an end and a beginning. Spent Bullets (1979/2001), a photogravure for which the artist placed a silver bullet she shot and retrieved, an intact bullet and casts as jewelry of a fired bullet, is an equally compressed statement with a similar rhythm.

Bradshaw’s work often has a scientific bent that she turns to aesthetic purposes, end- ing in places no scientist would.A series from 2002-4 combines the human body with a list of its material elements written directly on the skin of a man and a woman. Alternately

the woman is posed under a transparent veil imprinted with the names of the elements. Oxygen, the body’s largest component, comes at the top in proportionately large type, fol- lowed by carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and the rest, the letters dwindling with each element’s share. By a sleight of the mind, this simple fusion allows us to see the body elegantly in- tact and at the same time broken down, de- composed into its constituents. On one level restatements of the vanitas motif, they trans- fer that theme into a more objective, rational realm, while losing none of its mystery.

A paradoxical kind of science is most evident in 2√0 (1971/2008), a work resembling a sand clock that could double as an inven- tion. “I had the simple idea of substituting water for sand in a timer,” Bradshaw recalls, but the idea proved difficult to realize and interestingly the use of a liquid offered the possibility of engaging spatial dimension—a level. A sand clock consists of a pair of glass globes joined by a narrow neck through which sand flows effortlessly, the transfer al- ways taking the same amount of time.Water tends to seal this neck, demanding an addi- tional valve between the globes to equalize the pressure. Bradshaw experimented with the use of acetone and finally with the crea- tion of a vacuum.When vertical a stabilizing armature would have been necessary to make it a reliable timer; when horizontal, mark- ings for use as a level. Neither was provided. Though an instrument without a purpose, its shape, like an eight laid sideways, makes it a material infinity sign. As such, an instrument of measure that points to the immeasurable, it is emblematic of Bradshaw’s work.

Dove Bradshaw by Grazia Ippolito, 2008