Dove Bradshaw. Elements: The Devil Is On the Earth

In the organizer's words:

Time is something omnipresent, something constantly progressing, something always happening. And at the same time, time is an instance that can only be perceived through its causality - it is something invisible in itself, something subtle, and yet something determining. Time determines our existence, our existence, and guides the progress of our own lives. The relationship between time and space in our perception is variable: they occur independently of each other and yet overlap. Basically, people perceive them as separate from each other. This means that the effect of an event cannot occur earlier than its cause. To what extent are we in control, are we triggers of chain reactions in the time-space relationship and thus in world events? To what extent are we subordinate?

In the exhibition Elements: The Devil Is On the Earth, the American artist Dove Bradshaw (*1949, New York) is showing two series from her extensive oeuvre. In the Contingency series, Bradshaw introduces the dimension of time in space through materials that are treated with changing chemicals. She makes the progression of time visible by reactively connecting her works with it, developing in their given space. She makes it possible to experience the interplay between the influence of the human being who makes a decision to act and time, which deals with this decision under its own conditions and determines the consequences. If man can be aware of the consequences of his actions, then time knows about them with certainty - and concretizes them perceptibly as a clear consequence. These temporal consequences are written through natural contingency, structured chance and thus simultaneously through possibilities. Change is the driving motif of her work in this series.

In the Elements series, Dove Bradshaw forms chemical elements and transfers them into concrete objects that become mythological props and give them a story. The series thrives on a narrative of contradictions. Bradshaw uses eight elements from the periodic table as material: gold, silver, lead, arsenic, sulphur, mercury, cadmium and copper. The chemicals are each associated with a particular mystery, a fairy tale, a myth or a social circumstance. They were materialized in realistic forms as objects, as carriers. The development of the language of the works does not lie in their incompleteness or further development, but in the continuation through a mythological, narrative value, which lies in the reference of the depicted, in connection with the meaning of the individual chemical elements. Not reactive, but symbolic. Dove Bradshaw develops a poetics of possibilities, an analysis of freedom and explores the potential of unpredictability and the metaphorical reference of narrative and material.