The work of Dove Bradshaw works with our changing conceptions 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…
We’re confronting now it seems to me in the very full way that her work is itself working—the identity, not the separateness, but the identity of time and space.
The things that happen in her work are, so to speak, full of not her determination but its determination, such as chemical change, or gravity. She used the word event: whereas she’s interested in an undefined freedom of action for the chemistry. Of not doing anything. …what we find in Dove’s work is constant
experimentation with things to see what happens when you do that.
And the difference is the difference between
then and now. That then became beautiful for me by receiving dust. This
now equally whiteness and emptiness is willing to give itself and to change
itself, and without losing itself. So that then becomes a model for daily
behavior because it is anti-possession. Dove’s work is preparing us for a constant loss and a constant gain, and also of not knowing whether it’s good or bad. John
Cage
[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? * * * There’s that moment when it’s almost like there’s a choice between form and void, and yet we can’t make the choice; we have to somehow have both. And this is that kind of perilous tightrope edge that I see Dove’s work walking. * * * …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. And I took that phrase in two ways. First there’s the possibility of nothing, meaning it's possible that there would be nothing; then there's the possibility of nothing, meaning the world of potentiality comes out of nothing. And the egg piece to me seems to suggest all of that…
Thomas McEvilley
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
The mix of mind and matter in Dove Bradshaw’s work is constantly surprising and rewarding.
Edward Albee 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
Referring to the clock and level: Though an instrument without a purpose, its shape, like an eight layed sideway, makes it a material infinity sign. As such, an instrument of measure that points to the immeasurable, it is emblematic of Bradshaw’s work. David
Frankel
[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
Bradshaw’s plane of tarnishing silver does turn out to be a kind of a mirror, despite its lack of polish, its refusal of clear and literal reflection. Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate…We see through a darkened mirror.
Barry Schwabsky
Ken
Johnson
Attracted by her use of indeterminacy, the practice of using chance and natural forces to act upon her work, Cunningham invited Dove Bradshaw, along with William Anastasi, to become joint artistic advisors to his dance company in 1984. The resonances between Bradshaw’s work and that of Cunningham’s are clear; both made extensive use of chance procedures as part of their creation. Bradshaw’s Contingency Series abandons traditional artistic practices and uses materials that react differently depending on environmental conditions, just as Cunningham abandons not only musical forms, but narrative and other conventional elements of dance composition—such as cause and effect, and climax and anticlimax. Stephen
Jones
Some Conceptual art embraces depth and works on a number of levels—including the visual. Dove Bradshaw’s...Contingency Jets, made of silver, liver of sulfur, and beeswax applied to paper, are both compelling abstracts, rich in detail. But Bradshaw, a major innovator herself in artistic techniques for the past thirty-five years, is not content merely to present intriguing forms that repay even microscopic examination. No; we are also witnessing a chemical reaction in flagrante, a progressive devouring of the silver by the sulfur, leaving a residue of flakey white micro-crystals that form into tiny knobs. The artwork is changing, albeit very slowly, before our eyes, altering its shape, its composition, its texture (does it have an expiration date?) So Bradshaw has framed a slow dynamism, which for now looks like the silhouette of a water bear (tardigrade). It’s intriguing looking work, backed by an exciting concept.
Joel
Simpson
Bradshaw pushes us, in a salutary fashion, beyond the conventional gallery experience.
Tom McDonough
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 I-V 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
I have often felt the whirling vortex of life/death, creation/destruction in [Dove Bradshaw's] work from the time of [her] early porcelain chair pieces through the salt [works].
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...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 versus nature, or just about anything else, it works as a kind of universal mantra.
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