Jyll Bradley 'The friend I have/is a passionate friend'

two key aspects of relations between human beings – namely choice and friendship. These two related aspects of human contact place her original choice to use the medium in direct dialogue with a stridently normative structure that was fading out just as her images slunk into view.

Bradley gently replaced the light-box form with new content and cut it down to size in soft opposition to the Grand Central display and others like it. Now there are new works. Further contracting the normative the images lie deep in recessed cases – shrinking back into their mounts – creating reflections on the glossy interiors.

The new works draw you towards them. You look into them as well as at them. Unless the viewer is right in front of the work the printed photographic image is partially viewed at best. The light-boxes are modest and encourage the viewer to approach the work and close in. Choice and friendship are Bradley’s stated starting points.

Choice and friendship are also her methodology and provide her subjects. Those who appear in the light-box works are close to each other and close to her. There is a proximity here that we are invited to be part of. We are faced with the chance to engage with personal relationships within and as part of the structure of the work yet beyond any traditional, normative illusion of familialism.

The works do not loom over a grand hall and instead they create a real space of intimacy and reality.

Donald Judd wrote about the difference between the illusion of things and real illusion. For him real illusion might come from the colored shadows produced by the juxtaposition of colored Plexiglas and aluminum, rather than the attempt to create the illusion of depth and shadow in traditional representational art.

For Judd, it was the visual phenomena of the optical that was most important towards the creation of an art that could move towards some kind of truth beyond illusion in the service of ideology.

Bradley’s new light boxes – with their complex reflections from her color transparencies – are clearly indebted to Judd’s structures, but they go further in denial of the possibility of a universalism of optics and truth values. Bradley replaces the self-contained optical relationships that create ‘interest’ in Judd with a display