Instrucciones

TIM Arte Contemporáneo presents the exhibition INSTRUCTIONS by the artist Dominique Bradbury. The project is framed within the artist's most recent investigations into consumer society and visual capitalism. The focus of these investigations is the proliferation of images from her own algorithm and archival material, which allude to the fashion, beauty, skincare and wellness industries. Taken together, the works in this exhibition present a fragmented account of personal interests, everyday observations, fortuitous and forced digital encounters, as well as reflections on archetypes in the history of art and femininity. For the artist, one of the objectives of the project, in addition to deepening the imaginary of her work, has been to experiment with new ways of presenting and exhibiting the work, giving a new context to the gallery space and to the work itself. In INSTRUCTIONS, oil on canvas and digital prints are combined from a new spatiality, making reference to elements present in fashion concept stores (with hangers, shelves, backlit images) playing with their scale, functionality and visuality, in order to open paths to future material and conceptual processes, proposing crossroads of different languages and contexts from a critical and complicit look at the same time. Bradbury's work uses excerpts and references from fashion and beauty imagery to ambivalently allude to the relentless pursuit of novelty, youth and material aspirations. Through a language of colour, surface and texture the artist gives an enigmatic and poetic twist to such consumer fragments, opening up questions of ways of seeing and being seen in our ever so self-aware society. The artist seeks to question visual information as we perceive it today, unveiling its abstract and surreal nature: a mirage that only carries the meaning that we, as viewers, give it. The exhibition catalogue features texts and reflections by chilean writers Ileana Diotima and Martín López: "It is precisely in Dominique Bradbury's paintings that one looks closely. Folds. Glitter. The texture of the skin. The intimate relationship of things. Perhaps it is only when you look closely that the box of metaphors opens up and the notion of beauty is transformed into a slow effect like the movement of snakes. It pours out gradually. A tremor with a delayed effect. (...) these works seem to inspect objects closely, in the suspicion that they hide something unseen. It is the closeness of things when we desire them, together with the awareness of a possible misfortune. Objects that, without the need for physical human presence, humans never cease to be there. With their details, egos and pretensions, as admirable as they are dangerous." —excerpt from Ileana Diotima's text "Dominique Bradbury twists the preconceived codes that lead the gaze towards mere consumption - fashion, dermatology, the pharmaceutical regime spirit - towards grey zones in which such obligatory transit guides appear to circulate sideways, obliquely pointing out what is conspicuous by its absence. (...) Undoubtedly, we take care of the images: we seek to hold on to them, but we never stop chasing them everywhere; and it is in this irrevocable "but" that seems to lie the untiring burden of what we let fall as we stretch out our arms in the continual pursuit of something more." — excerpt from Martín López text About the artist: Dominique Bradbury (London, 1988). BA in Art from Universidad Católica de Chile (2012). MFA in Painting from Slade School of Fine Arts, University College London (2019). She also studied at the University of Fine Arts Münster, Germany (2015-2016). Bradbury has exhibited his work in Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, Germany, France and the UK. Awards and grants include German Academic Scholarship Exchange (DAAD), Becas Chile, Fondart and Eaton Fund.