SHANE CAMPBELL GALLERY, CHICAGO
Chris Bradley has created a Robert Gober-style sculptural constellation where common objects (pretzel sticks, potato chips, paint rollers) are cast in bronze, painted as real fakes, and presented as fractured icons extracted from a personal narrative. Where Gober’s icons are weighted with psychosexual trauma and Catholic guilt, Bradley’s objects are simply the products of boredom. Not that boredom is bad—Gober has shown us that we all have cages, and that we can dream ourselves out of them. Bradley’s cage is probably his studio, the home of his beer and chip stash. He balances the chips, beer, avocados, chewing gum and other foodstuffs onto lumber armatures and tops them with palm trees so that the shacks punctuate the gray-and-white gallery like little deserted islands. A line of pretzel sticks on the far wall form a horizon line, and there’s a piddling sound of trickling water from a makeshift fountain in a beverage cooler. The sense of a provisional existence is successful, but lacking any foreshadow of risk, magic, fear or fatality just compounds empty upon empty. Junk food totems—sculptural doodles, really—signal somebody captive within, and captivated by, their own life.
Published in Newcity (March 28, 2011)
