Level 9

Level 9

Ry David Bradley

Bowerbank Ninow
Level 9, 10 Lorne St, Auckland

26 September – 19 October 2019

Opening Thursday 26 September, 6:00pm

Showing alongside Beyond Range, new paintings by Simon Ingram

Ry David Bradley, XP&9<dfp, 2019, acrylic tapestry, 850 × 750 mm

In Level 9, Ry David Bradley presents a series of mechanically produced tapestries of images created by digitally manipulating photographs sourced from the never-ending churn of social and news media. Bradley’s digital manipulations reconfigure these raw materials into oneiric compositions that are both familiar and strange, comfortable and uncanny. With their lush, textured fabric surfaces, these works manipulate the viewer’s experience of digital imagery as ephemeral, screen-bound and indeterminate, offering instead strange visions of potential futures where information is something to be touched, breathed in and felt.

By transferring his digital imagery to the intensely physical medium of tapestry, which has a lineage dating back hundreds if not thousands of years, Bradley invokes ideas of permanence and historicity. In our present digital ecosystem, content is perpetually being created and destroyed while updates and bug-fixes silently re-configure the software environments through which we move. The idea of any object reaching a "finished" or permanent state is seemingly obsolete; everything in the online space is re-writable, temporary and malleable. Very few digital images ever escape the phantasmal realm of the cloud; Bradley’s works, in this respect, function as monuments to a digital ancestry that is being erased as quickly as it comes into being.

For Bradley, the physical and the virtual exist on a continuum, along which he looks both backwards and forwards. From bricks to pixels, his works describe the constituent building blocks of the world being recycled and reconfigured, both physical walls and images the products of a similar impetus to create and re-create meaning.