The Hole is delighted to present NOVACENE: Portraits Of A Machine, our third solo exhibition at the gallery by Australian-born new media artist Ry David Bradley. Known for his exploration of the impact of digital tools on painting and culture, Bradley’s new body of work makes portrait paintings of bots, a precious object of the 21st century. What is intelligence without a body; what does it mean to make a portrait of something that has no identity?

Influenced by the rise of AI tools like Dall-E and the algorithmic reality we now inhabit, Bradley began to think about how to paint the bots themselves with their all seeing eyes through triple lenses on phones, immense amounts of data and perhaps inner life. Bradley paints the bots as bodiless objects,  the face of the faceless machines with which we interact everyday, hidden agents of our experience of reality. Each one is a character and perhaps an abstraction, each with its own unique name generated in ASCII code. 由¯\\\_﴾ꔸ⍊ꔸ﴿\_/¯由 he gives machine names for machine paintings.&#x20;

Bradley’s title Novacene references a new geological age, characterized by the emergence of a new form of life produced by innovation in artificial intelligence technology. The Anthropocene – the geological age of humanity – represents the last few hundred years of human history, an infinitesimally tiny period. After a few centuries, the Anthropocene is already nearing the finish line catalyzed by the mass burning of fossil fuels and human destruction of earth’s environmental systems. With the end in sight and the Novacene just around the corner the subjects of Bradley’s bot paintings could just be our new neighbors.&#x20;

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 museums 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 Sullivan & Strumpf in Sydney & The Hole in New York. Bradley’s work is collected by the National Gallery of Victoria, Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon Housemusem, Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow, and numerous private collections around the world.


NOVACENE: Portraits Of A Machine

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