Slater Bradley (American, b. 1975) is best known for his “Doppelgänger Trilogy” from the early 2000s, in which he cast his own spitting image, model Benjamin Brock, to impersonate Ian Curtis, Michael Jackson, and Kurt Cobain in performances viewers might assume were Bradley himself—an exploration of the cult of celebrity and the mythology of images.
 
Premiering at the Johnson Museum, Bradley’s new two-channel video “Sequoia” (2013; two-channel HD video installation with sound, 2:17 min.) elaborates on such alienating chains of reflections. Channeling Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958) and Chris Marker’s “La Jetée” (1962), obsession and memory are major themes of Bradley’s recent work. For “My Conclusion/My Necessity” (2006; single-channel video installation with sound, 6:39 min.), also in the exhibition, the artist convinced a mother and daughter to reenact their performance of putting on lipstick and kissing Oscar Wilde’s tombstone in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, set to a soundtrack by indie rock band Unwound. While it continues Bradley’s interest in the sometimes tragic fan-idol relationship, this coming-of-age video is also a symbol for life’s confrontation with death, a major element of Bradley’s large-scale photo-drawings. The group of drawings on view will feature the artist’s muses Ida and Alina surrounded by obsessive gold or silver marks in the shape of tree rings—which, of course, recall the famous scene in “Vertigo” shot at Big Basin Redwoods State Park, setting into motion the never-ending circles of doomed desire.
 
This exhibition will be curated by Andrea Inselmann, the curator of modern and contemporary art and photography at the Johnson Museum.