Tobias Bradford:Stage Fright
18.05 – 03.07.2021
Closed
Hours
Monday to Saturday
10:00 am – 5:30 pm
Gallery
3–5 Swallow St
London
W1B 4DE
Stage Fright. Tobias Bradford presents a robot band, who are afraid to be seen.
Huxley-Parlour Gallery are delighted to present Tobias Bradford as the third artist to exhibit in the gallery’s Project Space. Bradford’s exhibition showcases a robot band, who are afraid to be seen.
Bradford’s practice looks at sentience and the uncanny, specifically in sculpted mechanical engineering such as puppets and robots. He is interested in debates surrounding free will, agency, and the increasingly ambiguous definition of ‘self’ when it comes to semi-sentient objects. His work seeks to defamiliarise objects by replicating ordinary movements on a technical level, and in turn, making the mundane, strange.
THE EXHIBITION
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Tobias Bradford: Stage Fright. Installation view
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Tobias Bradford: Stage Fright. Detail
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Tobias Bradford: Stage Fright. Detail
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Tobias Bradford: Stage Fright. Detail
Highlights
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Stage Fright. Bradford’s practice looks at sentience and the uncanny, specifically in sculpted mechanical engineering such as puppets and robots.
Bradford takes over the downstairs floor of HUXLEY-PARLOUR gallery with a performance of animatronic items.
Taking imaginative departure from the culture of twentieth century machinated bands like Chuck-e-Cheese, the exhibition will look closely at these cheaply produced, animated sculptures, whose performance will be jittery, intermittent, and nervous.
B. Sweden 1993
Biography
Tobias Bradford’s work engages in philosophical discussions around autonomy and the ‘self’. His animated installations incorporate mechanical engineering, robotics and puppetry which collectively forge an uncanny reality. By repeating everyday actions or motions, Bradford’s semi-sentient objects become defamiliarised and disassociated from that which they represent.
Bradford was born in Örebro, Sweden in 1993. He graduated from Goldsmiths University of London in 2019, and is currently on a break from his Masters at the Royal Art Institute of Stockholm. He has exhibited widely across Stockholm, Sweden, and London, UK most recently exhibiting at Future Watch: Tio Konstnärer i tiden at Stockholm Kulturhuset.
He lives between London and Stockholm.