Collin Bradford
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When I moved to Utah from the Great Lakes region, I was in the middle of intense grief about the already-unfolding climate crisis, which has only intensified since. Leaving the seemingly endless freshwater of the Great Lakes for Utah, with its droughts and wildfires, felt backward.
But Utah changed me in unexpected ways. Its exposed geology, with hundreds of millions of years visible in the strata of the mountains around me, insistently invited me to be still. From the timescale of the earth, our lives, our losses, and everything we know will become another thin line on the sides of future mountains. This didn’t bring me despair—it brought me peace, wonder, and awe. Learning to think in geologic time has both slowed my perception of human chaos and sped up my sense of geologic processes. Rocks erode into sand, and the chunk of earth that I live on is slowly tipping. Things that appear permanent are transient.
I started drawing rocks as a way to slow myself down and give them my full attention. Temporary Arrangement (Rock 6), one of those early drawings, is included in this exhibit because it came at this fulcrum point, when I was opening to what the earth had to teach me. The works here have all emerged from this shift in my perception of time and matter. In some of them, I try to create the experience of simultaneously seeing a cloud and a rock and recognizing both as temporary arrangements of matter. In others, I use colored transparent forms to defamiliarize our view of the land and draw attention to geologic activity. Others emphasize the continual flow of matter and the ephemerality of any particular form.
As life inevitably brings new griefs and new joys, geologic time and processes have brought solace and perspective. All matter is in flux. Mountains that seem eternal will erode, and new ones will rise. Every stone is fleeting. Every rock is a cloud.
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Collin Bradford has accelerated the sunset (literally), written massive words on the shores of the Great Lakes, and spent days on end staring at rocks. He makes video works, photographs, sculptural objects, drawings, and other artistic forms. These all incorporate his exploration of how we understand and relate to the land we inhabit and how language relates to our understanding of ourselves in the land. These works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, in traditional art spaces as well as film and video festivals, including at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI; The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art; The Anthology Film Archives in New York; New Insight at Art Chicago; The Cologne International Video Art Festival; and the Channels Video Art Festival in Melbourne, Australia.
He grew up in the Great Lakes region of the United States and currently lives in Utah.
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Instagram: @bradford_collin