Ry David Bradley “Search History”

The Hole

[Image: Ry David Bradley "Hyq.>K4." (2019) dye cotton tapestry, 80 x 130 in.]

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The Hole presents the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Australian artist Ry David Bradley. For his sophomore effort Bradley transforms the gallery into a CYC studio and hangs eight digitally-conceived classical tapestries. The exhibition is lit by searching LED spotlights selectively revealing and distracting from the artworks as they hunt around the room.

These new tapestry works debuted at HEART Museum in Herning, Denmark in a two-person installation “LETMEIN” with Jon Rafman. Having figured out how to transfer a digital painting to a jacquard woven tapestry, Bradley executed elaborately patterned abstract compositions and stretched them like paintings. In a room of custom carpet and computer-generated landscape, Bradley and Rafman took viewers behind the screen by creating immersive immaterial worlds.

“Search History” blends more antique ways of image making with a contemporary exhibition design and lighting scheme. The walls of the gallery have been curved and smoothed so no corners exist and the works hover in the grey void of the CYC studio install. The imagery Bradley weaves together with custom digital brushes mixes ancient art with futuristic compositions only possible on a digital platform. The idea of a search history being someone’s digital fingerprint, a unique bread crumb trail through an infinite image forest is suggested by the searching lights trying to track them around the room and reinforced by the works titles; unique computer-generated passwords.

The relationship between computing and weaving has been—ahem—interwoven from the beginning; punch card computing grew out of Joseph-Marie Jaquard’s pattern punch cards of the early-1800s, and his looms laid the groundwork for Ada Lovelace’s first computer algorithm. To weave an inherently digital image from pixels to threads is a kind of mind-boggling reversal. Here each thread is a different color and the depth of that line within the weave, like a little average color pixel zone, dictates the perceived color at a distance. Instead of printing a digital painting onto a fabric, which is the fate of most digital art today, this image is buried and revealed in the thick jacquard, with limited colors of thread à la CMYK making a full spectrum of color.

Ry David Bradley (b. 1979 Melbourne, Australia) received his MFA from Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Since then he has exhibited widely both at galleries and museums in his native Australia but also from New York to London, Milan, LA, Berlin, Paris and Palm Beach. His work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (HEART), Lyon Housemusem and numerous private collections around the world.