"OBJECTS OF DESIRE"

Says Bradford:

"The work is generated often as a response to western urban culture: advertising, signage, the graphic image, the Media, and the structures that these entities impose upon modern life.

Advertising aims to create desire, it then offers the means of sating that desire. Prolonged exposure to advertising can create false desire and frustration when the means to sate that desire is unobtainable. The work I make provides me with a platform to reclaim control over this persuasive tide of emotional implants.

I have two practices running in tandem, the first is large-scale 2D oil painting on un-primed linen. The second involves dipping 3D objects repeatedly in household gloss paint. These small-scale sculptural pieces are often accompanied by various mixed media, including photography, digital imagery and lighting effects.

Through painting, the modern bombardment of graphic imagery is assimilated, manipulated, upgraded and regurgitated as a means to rest back control of my desires. The work forms a resistance to the empty promises of 'objects of desire' and lifestyle choices that are not my own. Paradoxically the work becomes an 'object of desire' in itself, but one born of my own free will and with added content and meaning.

Imposing societal structures such as advertising are mocked, dislodged, and replaced with self-initiated structures that then form a physical and emotional template for my work.

This process is evident in my 'dipping' method. Retail objects or 'ready-mades' undergo a metamorphoses aimed at replacing their original meaning with an ambiguous meaning of my own making. Their function is denied, their surface signifiers replaced with colour and seductive uses of paint.

With 2D painting it is 'narrative' which under-goes a metamorphosis. A specific readable narrative is absolved of its functional duties and replaced with an abstracted narrative. The abstracted image left behind is used as a shell, a shape, a compositional template that allows an abstracted painting to evolve.

With the Television pieces the 'static' produced when the TV is switched on but not tuned in becomes a metaphor for the shut down of free will - the coma induced by nutrient deficient culture and imagery.

Both disciplines are linked further by the use of layering, or a process better described as creating 'strata'. The build up of paint over a period of time in layers is employed on the paintings surface or in the action of repeated ' dipping in order to sometimes conceal, sometimes reveal. A striated surface acknowledges the passing of time and mirrors another preoccupation: movement (the combination of time and space creates movement). Striation reveals a works history and acknowledges its place as a finite object in time.

The subversion of given realities brought about by the successful use of visual illusion is also dealt with in my work. A paintings inherent limitations of being inanimate, flat, and material, are another source of amusement for me. I like to mock these limitations by playing visual games with the paintings edges.

I make complex works in the simplest way. My work ackowledges an artwork's capacity to be both meaningless and profound".

Shumon Basar writes:

"Shane Bradford follows in a long tradition of 20th century painters
enamoured with post-Pollock paint drips. But Bradford enacts his painterly
fetish with one vital spelling difference: drip becomes dip.

He has been methodically and insistently dipping objects in sequences of
technicolour emulsion. Lollypop stick, baby's dummy, Paul Smith toothbrush,
toy car and spoon. Each is subjected to a precision process which eventually
renders the original object an ossified version of itself, seemingly
appended by a thick drip of still, concentric paint.

The geometric, graphic compositions that the paint assumes upon the objects
is literally only the surface of one's desire towards them. As you may have
noticed, the pre- and post- dip objects have connotations of oral usage. Add
to this the shiny, gelatinous disposition of the juicy colours, and
Bradford's painted objects seem literally good enough to eat. 'I like you so
much...mmm...I want to eat you!'

Bradford's luscious, sweet objects employ paint to remind us that desire is
an index of mortality. Eat this, sate your desire, and be prepared to pay
the price for your pleasure principle."

Shane's paintings and object-based works were brought to our attention by one of our arts consultants, Mark Thompson, who is also curator for the show.