Matthew Bradley

Storm Machine

Curated by Jeff Khan

Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces

22 June 2007 - 21 July 2007

Contemporary culture has done much to imply an impending sinister quality within mechanistic modes of transport. From 1960’s biker films to the forecasted auto-delinquency of Mad Max (1979), the symbiotic vehicle-to-human relationship of motor transport has been surreptitiously assessed and critiqued numerous times within recent history, and truly, the masculinity within these fabricated (often filmic) cultures is overt. Indeed this may fall in line with the cultural cliché surrounding the threat of the machine or artificial intelligence, but in particular, the motor vehicle may offer new concerns with regard to its potential for providing its user with superhuman powers (by means of speed and force) as well as the psychological implications of unbalanced interdependency that underlie the relationship of user and vehicle.

This notion of a gasoline-driven dystopia is investigated in Matthew Bradley’s idiosyncratic exhibition entitled Storm Machine. The show’s penultimate work, a giant true-scale model of a futuristic Monster Bike designed by the artist, holds a savage presence over the space. A mix of gruff and gritty metal with precise engineering and ingenuity, Monster Bike encapsulates perfectly the iconography of a fierce, masculine mechanistic vehicle. The bike leans in static disuse against the gallery wall, yet this is a brooding stillness, and implies the expected arrival of a human other to complete the ominous and destructive symbiosis.

Beside the Monster Bike the viewer is presented with an insight into the vehicle’s construction, by way of the artist’s computer-generated plans for the construction of the model, truly articulating the paradoxical delicacy surrounding the intricate engineering of this and other destructive vehicles. This is similarly demonstrated in Air Gun, an impressively produced pneumatic gun hung beside two television screens that display video works serving to quirkily demonstrate its construction. Bradley’s emphasis on process not only serves to create a certain indistinctiveness between artwork and artwork-in-progress, but it is this documentative approach that instigates a level of objectivity, if even passivity regarding the ethics of man and machine. The artist, much like a machine himself, merely builds and observes, without injecting any sense of pathos or socio-political stance into his creations.

Fascinating in its originality whilst all the while ambiguous in its ideological position, Matthew Bradley’s Storm Machine is a scrupulous investigation into the cultural mythologies surrounding the machine’s prophesized role in the initiation of a dystopic society.