Bradley Verhelle
Fine Artist and Illustrator
Portfolio
Below is a list of every major body of work and/or exhibition I have had the pleasure of creating and/or curating. Each section has a corresponding website page where the reserach, concepts, and material practice are expanded upon
What about a memory, if anything, makes up an identity? What does it mean to lose a memory, and what does it take to learn to forget? How mutable is a recollection, and what makes a thought 'real'? Who are you right now? Can a memory be shared, copied? To what extent? Is it possible to grow by means of regression? How do we remember slowly?
Mnemonic Mercury explores what it means to forget and asks how much we can concede while maintaining personal identity. Twelve color-film photographs mounted on
Periphery is an exhibition of print, photographic, and illustrative work by local artists Mia Brown-Seguin, Oliver Stern, and Bradley Verhelle. This collaborative project is a resopnse to artists' perceptions of their surroundings, senses of place, and the ways in which environments exist in our minds.
The work illuminates spaces hidden in plain sight, those physical environments peripheral to our vision, and dependent relationships between urban and natural spaces. By dispelling a 'true' sense of the world, embracing the unseen, distorted, and marginal, the individual perceptual experience is validated.
Periphery is made up of a variety of alternative and antiquated processes including aquatint prints, broad spectrum photography, cyanotype, gum-dichromate prints, illustrations, intaglio prints, and trichromatic photogrpahy. These processes come together, often in combination, to yield equally alternative represenetations of place.
ASTIGMA | Psychotic Interpretations of a World in Gum is a collection of gum dichromate prints exploring new and other realities through the lens of alternative process photography. The technical process of gum printing, a process which is heavily reliant on layering to create full color images, is central to the portrayal of these differing realities. Because the process is dependent on color separations, when the pigment corresponding to a layer is switched, the entire scene, landscape, portrait, undergoes a tonal shift, change in contrast, or other visual distortion.
Obelus to Ruination is an exhibition of photographic work outlining and exploring the process of reaping memories from birthplaces, hometowns, and other places of origin. Through the hazy lens of alternative printing processes, "home" becomes an amalgamation of the lived and the liminal, compelling viewers to hold onto that which they can identify from their own homes, childhoods, and memories. The roadside trail, the rusted bridge, the desecrated barn; all of these become the show's namesake obelisks, monuments to ruin. The work curates a collective memory among those engaging with the work and encourages us to hold these spaces close — whether or not we know them.