Silver Eye

Andre Bradley’s exhibition Family Systems Theory is a provocative exploration of his life as a young adult and his path to become an artist. The work interweaves Bradley’s photographs, writing, and pictures from his personal archive. This exhibition hinges on an array of pages from Bradley’s high school yearbook where he is pictured with the non-graduates in everyday clothes alongside the school’s the graduates who are shown wearing ceremonial cap and gown. This gesture of public shaming is contrasted with a series of photographic studies based on materials that Bradley rejected from his own paintings and collages in art school. Together these two sets of images are a meditation on narrative agency, the narrow distance between success and failure.

Participating Artist

1. Andre Bradley is based in Philadelphia and uses photography, curatorial practice and publishing to explore the subjects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and the Black community, race, photographic representation and narrative space. Bradley utilizes photography, installation, and experimental lectures as forms of ideological resistance that foreground lived experiences of Blackness against the background of art. Bradley graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Image Text Ithaca and the Rhode Island School of Design's photography M.F.A. programs. While at Rhode Island School of Design, he received the T.C. Colley Award for photographic excellence. While at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Bradley was named a George Ciscle Scholar in curatorial practice. Bradley's first photo-book, Dark Archives, I-41, was shortlisted for the Photo-Text Book Award at Les Rencontres d'Arles and the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation First Photo Book Award.