Slater Bradley

In his videos, photographs, performances, and paintings, Slater Bradley uses popular culture, notably punk and pop music—the aesthetics of their videos and posters, the tales of their heroes and antiheroes, and their sometimes raw expressiveness—to explore the timeless themes of legacy, identity, and mortality. Bradley is interested in how popular and cult figures endure over time, both in the collective imagination of their fans and through the continual dissemination of their music and videos. By appropriating images from album covers and music videos, he demonstrates how music and musicians shape, and are shaped by, collective memory in constantly shifting ways. In The Doppelgänger Trilogy (2001-04), a set of three videos in which an actor plays imaginary live performances as three ill-fated musicians—Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, and Michael Jackson—Bradley explores the power of video and tribute to grant certain personas a sort of immortality.