"Melody" video
08 March 05
The video for "Melody" - as strange and haunting as the song itself - was directed by the artist Slater Bradley.
The San Francisco-born, New York-based, Slater Bradley has been exhibiting his artwork extensively since 1997. During the past five years, his work has been shown at galleries and museums in, among others, New York, Paris, Geneva, Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Istanbul, Tokyo and Los Angeles. His work has been reproduced and reviewed in such places as The New York Times, Frieze, Artforum, Art in America, W, Dazed and Confused, Surface, The Village Voice, Time Out, Paper, Flash Art, Le Monde and The Los Angeles Times.
Bradley’s work has consistently mined the vein of melancholy that runs straight through the heart of popular culture. Fixing his sights on such iconic figures as Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, Bradley has created fictional videos and photographs that successfully stand-in for original materials. Bradley’s work in video, for example, usually incorporates footage that is manipulated to look readymade, as though it were plucked from some edgy historian’s archive. The sensual possibilities of disconnect — the poetics of the subcultural, of suicide and of depression — are repeatedly explored in images that longingly represent both the victimized and the heroic.
Slater Bradley is represented in numerous public and private collections including those of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His next major solo show is currently being organized by the Berkeley Art Museum to open in April 2005. A monographic study of his photographic work, Don’t Let Me Disappear: 1997-2002, is available through major booksellers.
You can watch the video in RealPlayer it by clicking here for the high-bandwidth version and here for the low-bandwidth version.