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(Enter Batgirl) Exit IlluminaziPost an Event »

Maniac Gallery

February 25 - February 25, 2011

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727 Leavenworth Street San Francisco, CA 94109
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(Enter Batgirl) Exit Illuminazi James Bradley, Pink Mask, acrylic on paper, 2010
MANIAC proudly introduces New York based painter James Bradley for his first solo program. Sequentially following Bradley's two-person exhibition New World Boredom (09.09 Maniac Los Angeles), and Obama Trauma (02.10, ATA San Francisco), Bradley has created Exit Illuminazi as the conclusion of his three part exhibition spanning the past two years. In consideration of unmasking a revisionary world, its rights and passages of the pa...st several decades deserted yet not fully decoded, Bradley's new body of work takes on a thematic tone regarding a quiet backlog of aftermath and turn of events existing in chaotic discord. Bradley's attention to vivid symbolism, and their cause and effect, gives definition to the role of the 'stand in' that is often seen reincarnated in his paintings. In Exit Illuminazi, Bradley uses contemporary and historical visual parables (Batgirl, Saint Francis, Obama, Chase logo, for example) as his visual stand in's. These parables, whether fragments of media culture, religion, political or corporate structures and identities, represent a common thread all relating back to a level of revelation and duality existing in the current world, operating beneath the surface of the well known ideologies. Developing a visual breakdown of the ideological innocence of a character like Batgirl, (a dualistic character of the 1960's representing a new wave of tyranny and crime fighting), a reworked Obama prayer painting, or Saint Francis during his moment of enlightenment, Bradley extends his interpretation of staging spectators as things fall apart in chronological disorder. The after effects of corruption or purposeful disorder is the end product of what has been considered 'real' during the 20th-21st Centuries, wherein 'real' is defined as: what you have seen, what is now, what will be hereafter.