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Jen Bradley at Schoolhouse Gallery July 2, 2008 Jen Bradley I love this work, at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown. Jen Bradley starts with toile. Never heard of the stuff? Well, if you were not in Barbara Bush's class at Smith or are not a devotee of haute WASP Upper East Side interior decoration, you may be excused. Toile (that's "twahl", since it's French) is a pattern found in fabric and wallpaper, often in blue and white, featuring images of 18th century upper class women and occasionally men in romantic pastoral settings or refined drawing rooms. So Bradley starts with these and quietly inserts images of gorillas in exactly the same tone and color, as if they were just coexisting in the same space. So you have the hyper-refined ladies (swoon) confronted by their evolutionary ancestors. To me, the message is that we are less separated from the gorillas than we would like to think, but there are other possible ways to look at these, too. Are they a comment on the artifice of art? (It's no coincidence that the two words share a common root.) On the thinness of the veneer of civilization? Your thoughts?? And by the way, Barbara never graduated from Smith (my alma mater,I will confess) - she dropped out to marry W's father. What a throwback.   < Prev   Next >