Notations, 1988
limestone: 12 in. cube, copper prism: 4 in. height
Sirius Art Center, Cobh, Ireland

D O V E B R A D S H A W
Constructions
Spirit of Discovery 2
Ingreja do Convento de Santo Antonió
Trancoso, Portugal
June 21– 23, 2007

This is Dove Bradshaw’s second exhibition for the Spirit of Discovery in the Ingreja do Convento de Santo Antonió. Two new reliefs were made for the occasion in a room off the apse. At the opening the Mayor of Trancoso requested that they become permanent installations. In the apse a sculpture and 63 posters from past exhibitions were installed. One of the reliefs, Zero Space, Zero Time, Infinite Heat, 1988/2007, consists of a skim coat of plaster applied to a wall in the shape of an equilateral triangle 70 cm each side. Physicists consider an equilateral triangle as the current model for the universe. Pictured with the weight on bottom, it is an inversion of this work (see next page). The second relief, titled Oracle, consists of 18 saw cuts – 70 cm long, 7cm apart – scored into a wall. Seventy is the most frequently occurring number in the bible and is generally reserved for God. Repeated again and again it often symbolizes its bloody history. Eighteen – the numeric value of the Hebrew word for life, chai (embodied in the Jewish toast l'chayim—“to life”) also refers to the Living God. Charitable contributions which are believed to prolong life, are routinely given in multiples of 18. Not without significance, the Bhagavad Gita has 18 chapters.

In the apse, the sculpture, titled Notation VI, situates a copper prism on a 35 cm limestone cube. Outdoors the copper produces a verdigris stain on the limestone. On the walls the posters are from an edition of 24. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York owns half the edition; the remainder will be acquired later this year. Some were made at the time of the exhibitions, the rest retrospectively between the fall of 2006 and the present. They represent 47 solo exhibitions all over the world, 6 curated exhibitions and 10 collaborations with Merce Cunningham and John Cage.
Beginning in 1969, Bradshaw pioneered the use of Indeterminacy in sculpture, painting, performance and film. Her persistent relinquishment of control took Conceptual Art in a sensuous direction. By enlisting the unpredictability of life forces she first embraced Indeterminacy in a 1969 installation introducing a pair of mourning doves to bicycle wheels and floor mounted targets. Some of her other gestures toward Indeterminacy have involved chance positioning of work, use of materials particularly susceptible to weather and indoor atmosphere, the gradual erosion of water, or the use of inherently unstable substances such as acetone, mercury and sulfur. Anticipating the Museum Interventionist Movement, an ongoing Indeterminate work, titled Performance, involves her 1976 “claim” of a Metropolitan Museum of Art fire hose. After mounting a guerrilla wall label, in 1978 her self-published postcard was quietly placed in the museum shop. In recognition of her gesture, a 1992 official museum postcard was issued and in 2006, Rosalind Jacobs, a Dada collector, acquired the updated label claiming the hose as a work of art. After a brief interval she donated it to the museum which, completing the circle, accepted it into their permanent collection. Bradshaw’s equally early infusion of scientific exploration has been broadly embraced into the Weathering and Art / Science Movements. In this vein she made the silver and chemically activated Contingency Paintings sensitive to atmospheric conditions. Weather served as a catalyst slowly capturing transient metamorphoses in marble, pyrite and copper in the Indeterminacy, Material/Immaterial and Notation works. In other works Bradshaw plots the gradual erosion of salt and stone with water as the transformative agent. Salt, Half Heard, similar to Eurasia shown here last year, is included in the Missing Peace, Artists & the Dalai Lama on display at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York until September 3rd. Over this seven month period the salt will grow miniature fractal forests. Time is one of Bradshaw’s most frequently used materials and one of her key subjects.

John Cage, a long time champion, discussed her work with Thomas McEvilley in Dove Bradshaw, Works, 1969-1993. This transcript was reprinted as a chapter in McEvilley’s 1999 Sculpture in the Age of Doubt and in a 2003 monograph The Art of Dove Bradshaw, Nature Change and Indeterminacy, Batty Publisher, for which Mr. McEvilley wrote the essay. Cage selected her to accompany him in his 1991 Carnegie International presentation and she was represented in the similarly scored Rolywholyover Circus, 1993-5, consisting of his selection of Twentieth Century works. Appointed in 1984 as Artistic Advisor with William Anastasi for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, she designed sets, costumes and lighting for a decade of the company’s stage and television productions around the world. They were accompanied by the music of John Cage, David Tudor, Takahisa Kosugi and Emanuel Dimas De Melo Pimenta. In 1984 an early survey titled, Works 1969-1984, was shown at Syracuse University, Utica, New York and she has had two mid-career exhibitions, one in 1998 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the other, in 2003 titled Dove Bradshaw, Formformlessness, 1969-2003, at City University of New York. Represented in the permanent collections of numerous American, European and Russian museums, she also regularly exhibits internationally. In June of 2006 Bradshaw was commissioned by the Baronessa Lucrezia Durini to execute Radio Rocks as a permanent installation for the town of Bolognano, Italy. Galena and pyrite tuners continuously draw local, short wave and outer space signals echoing the Big Bang. Last fall sponsored by Shu Uemura of Shu Uemura Cosmetics, she traveled to Asia for the first time exhibiting in Tokyo’s Gallery 360°. For the 6th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea she presented Six Continents, an erosion piece involving salt taken from each of the continents. In 1975 she won a National Endowment of the Arts Award for Sculpture and in 1985 The Pollack/Krasner Award for Painting. In 1986 she designed the costumes for the Points In Space video that won the Prague d’Or the following year. She was awarded a 2002 Furthermore Grant for The Art of Dove Bradshaw and a 2006 National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Grant. Bradshaw will have solo exhibitions at Senzatitolo Gallery, Rome and Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, MA later this year.

Without Title, 1988/2006
plaster on a wall, 36 inch equilateral triangle