Dove Bradshaw works with our changing conception of time and space which we have assumed for a long time are two different things. She’s involved, as we are in our lives, because of art, with an almost scientific procedure, so that she can experiment in such a way as to prove something. And she can subject us to the results of her experiments which can open us to the life we are living…. John
Cage
Dove Bradshaw's work is always provocative in the sense that it accomplishes one of art's primary functions - making us reconsider the boundaries and definitions of art. Edward
Albee
Dove Bradshaw’s work exists at the interstices of time, magic, alchemy, and natural materials. ... Three large paintings in the show revealed how dramatically this acid can create expressive landscapes. Contingency Pour takes Pollock’s drip painting technique to the next level; the liver of sulfur not only makes marks on the silver, it also continues to interact. Jan
Garden Castro
[Bradshaw’s] work can be seen as balanced at that line where you’re seeking for that other sense of intention which is in nature, without completely loosing your grip on culture, or that very circumscribed trap of limited intention which is history. So in terms of [John Cage’s] remark about getting out of whatever cage you are in, Dove’s work is about hovering at the door of that cage maybe you’re not sure which way to go? Bradshaw seems to have found an enduring mode of indeterminacy beyond Cage’s idea of the event that remains indeterminate until it happens. The flux produced by chemical ferment in a Contingency painting never ends unless the painting itself is destroyed…. It will continue to document the process of change in the face of all certainties.
Thomas McEvilley
[Bradshaw’s] attraction to the truth of indeterminacy is equal to [her] suspicion of the absolute, of anything that attempts to fix meaning or to set a standard. …[She] values the evolving dimension of each present moment and the stillness required to notice it.
Regina Coppola University of Massachusetts, John Cage:
…Marcel Duchamp said, speaking of Utopia, that we won’t be
able to reach it till we give up the notion of possession. And this work
of Dove’s confronts possession completely. …I was impressed
by the difference between Rauchenberg’s empty white canvases and
the monochromatic white works that Dove has recently made, which if you
touch them…the pigment comes off. Not only is it nature in transition
from within, but we can move it, remove it by contact. That’s not
exactly the same as those years ago, also beautiful works of Rauschenberg. John Cage and Thomas McEvilley in Conversation, 1993 …In relation to the much earlier works, the eggshell works from 1969. First there was the broken eggshell in bronze, then later in silver, then in 1988, the ones in gold. …It stands at the beginning, like a matrix out of which Dove’s oeuvre unfolds. So, like the changing paintings, it has to do with going through the veil between form and non-form. The broken eggshell is there like the record of a transit, a crossing of that border. It has also struck me that the distinction you’ve brought up is like the Buddhist ideas that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. It reminds me too of something that I’ve read where you talked about the possibility of there being nothing. And I took that phrase in two ways. First there’s the possibility of nothing, meaning that the world of potentiality comes out of nothing. And the egg piece to me seems to suggest all of that… Thomas McEvilley JC and MC, 1993
Barry Schwabsky
…Bradshaw pushes us, in a salutary fashion, beyond the conventional gallery experience.
Tom McEonough Since Bradshaw’s pieces are never final but will continue to change, how could a particular work be invalid? It can only be found more or less attractive at a particular moment. It’s a more Oriental esthetic philosophy than we are used to; risky, by Western standards, yet it produces beautiful results.
Reagan Upshaw Dove Bradshaw…has a distinct individual voice…most of the works here are unfinished, and never will be finished. She likes to set a work in motion, then put it out into the world to continue under its own steam. Contingency 1-5, for instance, consists of five silver panels, treated with liver of sulfur. …As the various substances react with each other and with the air, with the water in the air, and with the moisture in the breath of the spectators-patches, blotches, lines and dots bloom and scab across the surface of the metal.
Duncan McLean
The best of the serious art follows Buddhism's tenet of stripping away the extraneous. …..And refreshing the conceptualism of the ubiquitous debris pile, Dove Bradshaw (a John Cage devotee) has hung a slowly dripping glass funnel filled with water over a cone of Himalayan salt. An elegant visual balance and a concise metaphor for time, death, man vs. nature, or just about anything else, it works as a kind of universal mantra.
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