SLATER BRADLEY (San Francisco, California, 1975). "Perfect Empathy (Alina Melancholina)," 2012. Crumpled black and white fiber print and silver marker pen. Unique piece. Enclosed certificate signed by the artist. Measurements: 200 x 145 x 11 cm. Drawing from intimate experiences, Slater Bradley explores the universal narrative of lost love in a photographic and video corpus starring Alina. In a brilliant play of mirrors between reality and fiction, Alina is assimilated to filmic characters, such as the dream woman in Chris Marker's "La Jetée" or the mysterious protagonist of Hitchcock's "Vertigo". Bradley achieves the image of the idealized and unattainable woman they embody by manipulating the backgrounds with painstaking techniques and achieving timeless qualities. Slater Bradley graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1998. Bradley's photographic series Don't Let Me Disappear (1997-2003), named after a phrase from Holden Caulfield's Catcher in the Rye, is replete with autobiographical references, personal symbols, and artistic and musical influences. In JFK Jr. (1999), the camera voyeuristically follows a young woman waiting her turn to lay a flower in memory of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy; the mourner does not notice the filmmaker's gaze until the final frame. Bradley compares his art to butterfly collecting in the video I Was Rooting For You (Butterfly Catcher at Home) (2000). In The Laurel Tree (Beach) (2000), actress Chloë Sevigny recites a passage about art from Thomas Mann's novel Tonio Krögor. Female Gargoyle (2000) presents a woman standing precariously near the ledge of a building. The video Theory and Observation (2002) reflects on the relationship between reason and faith through images of a choir singing in Notre Dame Cathedral and excerpts from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time. For "The Doppelganger Trilogy" (2001-04), Bradley staged concerts by three fallen heroes of the pop music world - Ian Curtis of Joy Division, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Michael Jackson - performed by his real-life doppelganger, Benjamin Brock. Since the artist met Brock in a nightclub in 1999, he has repeatedly employed him in various guises in his photographs, videos, and drawings, reflecting on complicated notions of duplicated and erased identities. In the video The Year of the Doppelganger (2005), Bradley casts Brock in the role of a skinny rock musician who plays the drums so intensely that he doesn't realize that his soccer field is empty and is usurped for team practice. In Uncharted Settlements (2005), Bradley, Brock and a plethora of fans are unrecognizable under their Star Wars costumes, a situation characterized by both anonymity and community. The film My Conclusion/My Necessity (2005-06) tours the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris and captures a young woman applying a lipstick kiss to Oscar Wilde's headstone. Brock appears in an astronaut suit wandering through New York's Museum of Natural History to the sound of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" in Dark Night of the Soul (2005-06), reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bradley has participated in solo exhibitions at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (2000), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2005), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2005), and the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis (2007), among others. His work has also been included in important group exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial (2004), video-music-video at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (2005), and Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2007). In 2005 he received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Video Award. Bradley lives and works in New York.