COLLIN BRADFORD / Temporary Configurations of Earth’s Matter

October 16, 2019 – January 24, 2020

Bradford’s work explores the incompleteness of the various ways we can know and represent the land: first-person observation, photographs, surveying, walking, satellite imagery, 3D scans of the earth’s surface taken from space shuttles, etc. Having experimented with these different methods, Bradford is less concerned with images and the apparatuses that produce them. He addresses the land more directly, turning toward the dirt and rocks themselves, the stratified cliffs, the Gambel oaks, and investigates more deeply how everything we know is only a temporary configuration of the land’s matter.

Header image: Bingham Canyon Mine, Collin Bradford

The mountains and valleys, the buildings we work in, the roads we travel on, the plants we eat, and therefore our own flesh, bones, brain – all are fleeting configurations of the earth’s matter, and all of that matter will erode, decompose, disperse, and once again become the earth. We will become the rocks of the future. This cyclic perspective of time is an understanding expressed in ancient wisdom traditions and in the natural sciences – a questioning of how we conceive of our relationship to the physical world, and how we make sense of our place on earth and in time.

About the Artist

Collin Bradford has accelerated the sunset (literally), written massive words on the shores of the Great Lakes, and spent days on end staring at rocks (while drawing them). He makes video works, photographs, sculptural objects, drawings, and other artistic forms. All of these become ways of thinking about how we understand and relate to the land we inhabit and how language shapes our understanding of ourselves and the world. He has lived all over the United States and currently resides and works in Utah, where he also teaches at Brigham Young University. His work has been shown internationally and throughout the United States, including at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI; The Anthology Film Archive in New York City; MADATAC in Madrid, Spain; and the Channels Video Art Festival in Melbourne, Australia. www.collinbradford.org