The Hole is proud to present the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Australian artist Ry David Bradley. For his sophomore effort, Bradley transforms the gallery into a CYC studio and hangs eight digitally-conceived classical tapestries. The exhibition is lit by searching LED spotlights selectively revealing and distracting from the artworks as they hunt around the room.

These new works debuted at HEART Museum in Herning, Denmark in a two-person installation titled “LETMEIN” with Jon Rafman. Having figured out how to transfer a digital painting to a jacquard woven tapestry, Bradley executed elaborately patterned abstract compositions and stretched them like paintings. In a room of custom carpet and computer-generated landscape, Bradley and Rafman let people into the screenic universe through creating immersive immaterial worlds.

“Search History” blends more antique ways of image making with a slick futuristic exhibition design and lighting scheme. The walls of the gallery have been curved and smoothed so no corners exist, and the works hover in the grey void of our CYC studio install. The imagery Bradley weaves together with custom digital brushes mixes ancient art with futuristic compositions only possible from a digital platform. The idea of a search history being someone’s digital fingerprint, a unique bread crumb trail through an infinite image forest is suggested by the searching lights trying to track them around the room.

The relationship between computing and weaving has numerous flash points of contact over the past few hundred years, from weaving patterns creating the groundwork for the first computer algorithms to punch card computing mimicking pattern card to code being a type of math weaving and the million other shared metaphors the two very different disciplines each feature. Here, the work is made with each thread being a different color and by the depth of that line within the weave, like a little average color pixel zone, dictating the perceived color at a distance. Instead of printing a digital painting onto a fabric, which is sadly what most digital painting still consists of today, this image is buried and revealed in the thick jacquard, with limited colors of thread a la CMYK making a full spectrum of color.

Ry David Bradley (b. 1979 Melbourne, Australia) received his MFA, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Since then he has exhibited widely both at galleries and museum in his native Australia, as well as in exhibitions and fairs in New York, London, Milan, Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, and Palm Beach. Bradley is represented by Tristan Koenig in Australia, Bill Brady Gallery in Kansas City and Miami, and Brand New Gallery in Milan. His work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon Housemusem, and numerous private collections around the world.