Press

ROCHESTER CITY NEWSPAPER
By Rebecca Rafferty on January 21, 2009

Future Studies (Exerpt from review)

Gallery r

Another artist concerned with our forsaking the Earth is RIT’s Bradley Butler, whose “A Day at the Beach, 2″ in acrylic and conte gives only the vaguest suggestion of sand and sky, which is almost completely overcome by sweeps of black wind and tongues of flame rising from the earth. I saw and loved his work last year in his solo show at the Rochester Contemporary Lab Space.

ROCHESTER CITY NEWSPAPER
By Rebecca Rafferty on Jun. 18th, 2008

“The Future Consequences of Neglect”
Bradley Butler
Through June 29

Rochester Contemporary LAB Space

Art does not occur in a vacuum. Artists are often sensitive to cultural concerns, and some of the best art has served as a visual record of social and political climates. Bradley Butler’s art forecasts the result of actual climate change, reflecting that the political scene is finally giving some acceptance to long-standing alarms from scientists. It’s a heavy issue, and humans are faced with the duty to quickly turn around the damage that we’ve done. In acting as though we are higher organisms living on the planet, and not of the same stuff as everything else, we have largely estranged ourselves from our home, and the result of this horrifying concept is cropping up again and again in art these days. M. Night Shyamalan’s mysterious new film, “The Happening,” seems to be about nature rejecting humans, disposing of us like the destructive virus that we maybe are. In “The Future Consequences of Neglect,” now on display in the Rochester Contemporary LAB Space, Butler’s provocative paintings appear to be about nature reclaiming us, taking away our privilege to be human as we currently know it.

Many of Butler’s canvases depict human-animal hybrid creatures, dubbed with likewise hybrid names (i.e. Homodus Vulgaris), all of whom seem bewildered by their strange existence and confront the viewer with intense eyes. The paintings that most interested me were the nearly abstracted, very timely apocalyptic seascapes, for which Butler employed a simple palette of white, red, brown, blue, black, and gray. Skillfully vague hints at ocean and land are absorbed by the kinetic sweep of black in the foreground, and the viewer is left with the sinking inkling of being caught in a crucial shift. The small show challenges our role as the inattentive and greedy keepers of this garden planet. At last, the audience is listening.

THE BUFFALO NEWS
By Colin Dabkowski on July 23rd, 2007

* The painting, Homarus Gammantatus used to represent the show, click the image to view larger.