This next week is your last chance to see Elaine Bradford and Seth Mittag's really top-quality show FICTITIOUS REALITIES / REALISTIC FICTIONS at Art Palace.
Bradford's work has been so visually and
conceptually strong for the past 2-3 years that I was very curious to
see how she would evolve as an artist. I never saw this coming.
Bradford steered clear of the easy way out - larger scale, bigger game
- and instead has gone small, focusing on interior worlds and
(SHOCKINGLY) narratives for her quadre of taxidermied squirrels (and
fellow Sciuridae). There's even a stop-motion video, co-created with
David Waddell and Teresa O'Connor! The video provides a storyline to
the assemblages of planets and squirrels Bradford created for the show,
imbuing the pretty displays with an epic quality that might not have
been evident otherwise. It's very interesting to see artists
collaborating in this way, across media (even if the strict division of
media is totally boring and we're all so over it these days), to help
birth a shift in an artist's work, as it seems happened in this case.
Seth Mittag's mixed media sculptural works are interesting in a
different way, though they also invoke a very vivid storyline. They
remind of Fischer Price play sets, designed to teach kids how to
become good consumer/work drones, like the tiny cash register set, or a
tiny McDonalds. However, Mittag's constructed scenes littered with
conspicuously poignant trash, like empty bottles, cigarette butts,
piles of VHS tapes, etc., exude a very personal sense of heavy
melancholy and drunken loss not especially present in Fisher Price's
vision.