2008

Beginning with the recent exhibition Bradley Wester Paper or Plastic: 7 Years at Mack B Projects in the Winter of 2007 — an ad hoc retrospective of work — I choose to recycle my work as I do the ephemera from which much of it is made. In this and future solo exhibitions I mean to create very large three-dimensional compositions with the components of early and new work. Individual paintings, drawings, sculpture, assemblage, collage, installation, and digital technology, often altered for its new context, invite a reconsideration of their references while an integrated whole is imagined. Mindfully a painter, with the large-scale installation I make particular and unique reference to color and light, both literal and illusionistic, dumb and academic.

Commonplace paper packaging materials and ephemera are transformed in my work in a variety of ways that then make numerous iconographic references—from the modernist grid to computer circuitry, from the Italian Baroque to Japanese Anime. When my early drawing/collages, using actual paper stationery-store labels and stickers, began to impersonate the look and geometry of computer circuit boards (2000-1), I was inspired to enlist real computer circuitry to ‘re-draw’ the label designs as digital files in the Adobe Illustrator graphics program: the blank paper label—a low-tech information architecture, mimicking circuitry—a hi-tech information architecture, which in turn mimics the original ‘dumb’ paper label. Full circle. I want to have it both ways: exploit the glamour and scope of technology while retaining the political agency of art made with my hands out of mundane materials.

In these part-digital paintings, digitally drawn files of labels are manipulated and arranged within the computer, then printed directly to canvas as structural maps or blueprints for paintings. (Or to paper and other media for print editions, giant digital murals, or 3-D laminated constructions—using state-of-the-art digital print technologies.) Once printed, I paint into these canvases with a precise hand, using Flashe and Acryla Gouache to suggest the flat dry surface of the original paper label and to blur the line between the handmade mark and the mechanical one. The work demands that I resist the painterly brush stroke in an attempt to re-imagine painting in the age of accessible digital reproduction. These paintings inhabit a realm between original and repro, rigid and loose, high and low; they speculate on the relationship between information and the vehicle that carries it.

2005 saw everyday packaging waste added to the common stationery-store labels, stickers, and burst signs that have been the primary visual elements in my work for the last six years. Materials like small boxes, plastic blister packs, cardboard, ribbon, Mylar, tape, foam core, wire, plastic, and small round and oval pre-stretched art-store canvases with graphite and paint. These works are decidedly non-technical, deceptively simple painting/constructions that enlist a completely transparent technique: humble materials, simple methodology, everything revealed. Each artwork is a collection of familiar items that initiate a fast and knowing read, but which suddenly become strange—materials that logic tells you don’t belong together in a work of art. The work slows down, deepens, as individual components lose familiar references. Mundane parts begin to form a mysterious whole which becomes essential, utterly itself.

“Wester has titled 40 individual objects, and yet the cubic volume of his space can be read as an enormous three-dimensional composition with many individual components. His work is highly structured and based in geometric forms: circles, squares, rectangles. From this structure he departs in all directions to create an environment that is fluid, colorful and energized. He often retains the ground or foundation of a traditional painting, albeit made of Styrofoam.”

“His work is punctuated with color -often bright and often day-glo - including lime green or hot pink. Softer baby blues and pinks enter the picture as well.”

“In one section, two tables laden with shapes and forms lead into his space from the line in the concrete floor. From the edge of the tables, the eye drops down to flat designs on the floor across to a door and up the wall and over a silver duct near the light track. Wester's space is like a giant laboratory of ideas and experiments. Each aspect of his enormous composition has been carefully planned and orchestrated. His complex, multidimensional work calls to mind an ordered scientific equation that explains the chaos of the universe.”

—Mark Ormond; Pelican Press, Sarasota FL
December 7, 2007