Bradley Wester

April 22, 2018

Review of MoMA Screening and Wester Reading

The awesome Emily Colucci of Filthy Dreams fame—a blog that analyzes art, culture and politics which is supported by the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program— has written an article about the MoMA screening of Diane Torr’s MAN FOR A DAY, and a bit about my post-screening reading, which included the story of Diane’s and my collaboration in the early 80’s, the very first time Diane did drag: Role Model: Diane Torr

May 31, 2017

“DISCOurse #3: Velvet Rope” Studio Video

#studiovisit #artstudio #contemporaryart #contemporaryartcurator #contemporarysculpture #contemporarypainting #shinegeist #shine #disco #DISCOurse #upcomingexhibition: "DISCOurse #3: Velvet Rope" @yellowperilgallery opens July 1 in #ProvidenceRI and "Night Fever" @futuretenant in #Pittsburgh opens July 7 #curator @emilycolucci ; #nightfever #velvetrope #bothsideslikechanel #newartwork #hybridpractice #BlackMirror #twosides #painting #sculpture #contemporaryartcollector #pipecleaner #Mylar #dichroic #rhinestones #glitter

A post shared by Bradley Wester (@buckwest) on May 28, 2017 at 1:58pm PDT

DILETTANTE (publication)

Dilettante is a biennial publication that comes out of the residency program Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange.

My contribution below:

The inaugural residency took place from July 21-28, 2012 in New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two failed utopian communities from the early 19th century, where thirty-four residents spent the week discussing a selection of texts and the theme “Community, Utopia, and the Individual.” Dilettante’s contributors are residents, staff members, or invited guests from Summer Forum 2012. The contributions together form a diverse group (transcripts, poems, visual pieces, correspondence, essays, photos, etc.) but are tied—sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely—to the theme, the place, the texts, or the residency experience.

AIR TRACES (publication launch)

AIR Traces is a unique collection of traces, testimonies, artworks, projects and souvenirs by 56 artists that spent a residency period in AIR Antwerpen. My contribution below:

The text in middle image reads:

(occupy)

the novel of living together as two men verlaine when I was sixteen a retrospective looking like a group show a room of colourful conceptual wall-to whereof one can speak the art world is full of talk behind almost in working towards a provisional definition of how the term failure is used what impertinence said the pudding I wonder how you’d like it if I the pavilions commissioned over the years by the various nations taking part in the exhibition intends to explore imagination as the primary force for emancipation and what do you believe your eyes are my words the gun is cocked any attempt to make sense of Islamic art and architecture as a whole in the last decade a prior has focused attention on the creations of how might one decipher the codes governing the syntax of the letters gathered in der neuen ausgabe von inaesthetik geht es um politiken der kunst gibt during the last ten years of my life my mother gradually lost her

March 23, 2015

REVIEW of DISCOurse #2: SHINE, by Emily Colucci

Read Emily Colucci’s review of my recent exhibition at PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY in New York, on her blog, filthy dreams (For Minorities Who Don’t Even Fit Into Our Own Minorities): Dance With Me In The Disco Heat: Disco Memories In Bradley Wester’s ‘DISCOurse #2: Shine’.

July 16, 2012

SUMMER FORUM for inquiry + exchange

I have been chosen as a participant in the inaugural Summer Forum for Inquiry + Exchange residency which seeks to nurture and facilitate conversation and creative exploration through an examination of contemporary texts. Check out and keep tabs on this unique, nomadic, and non-instituionalized residency model out of Chicago.

Participants and invited guests will meet in New Harmony, Indiana for a one-week summer residency, 21 July – 28 July, to engage in an extended dialogue centered on directed readings on the theme of Community, Utopia, and the Individual. The texts are culled from a broad spectrum of materials: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, theory and criticism, comics, blogs, online forums, tweets, etc.

The dialogue generated during the week is the focal point of the Forum, empowering the engaged community and legitimating the spontaneous collaborative scholarship created in the space. The strength of the dialogue lies in the disciplinary diversity of the participants — writers, artists, thinkers, musicians, students, teachers, scientists, consultants, etc. — along with the concerted move away from specialization and instead toward generalized study.

January 6, 2012

Antwerp Studio Video, November 2011

I took this video from my studio residency in Antwerp (August-November 2011) in the heart of the city’s historic port. AIR Antwerpen is an international residence project for artists, housed in the old lockman’s mansion between the river and port canals. Massive barges from around the world floated by my rooms day and night entering or exiting the lock which lifted or lowered them to river or industrial canal level. Here you will get a glimpse of this and my studio. You will see briefly the video artists Ronny Heiremans and Katleen Vermeir, who live and work in Brussels, and who were visiting that day in order to record my voice reading various texts for their new video, The Residence (A wager for the afterlife) (2012). Residence will have its two-part premier at both Argos—Center for Art and Media in Brussels, and at Extra City—Kunsthal Antwerpen, late January and early February 2012.

Check out their last project, The Good Life (a guided tour) (2009), which made me a huge fan.

August 11, 2011

Studio Movie, Bradley Wester – 8/11/11

Moving images inside Brooklyn NY Sunset Park studio of new work in progress, August 2011

https://youtu.be/-wCGg0-mERo

Artwork from the Islamic series, final part 3 of an eight-year project: “Ephemera & Culture: Italy, Turkey, and Japan—a Trilogy,” three bodies of artwork initiated in three distinct and symmetrical cultures outside the U.S.