Catalogue > At random

"Beatings Of The Devil" is based on the concept and weather event called sunshowers, or, as my grandmother would often say when it rained while the sun was shining, “The devil is beating his wife”. This wildly inappropriate, and outdated colloquial phrase, which resonated deeply within me as a child, provides a point of departure and interpretation for this work. Created through a series of shoots spanning over four years, the piece has evolved into a memorial to my mother, and a reckoning for my father, who recently lost his wife of 51 years. The piece premiered at the 2022 Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, and won the Vanguard Award for Best Experimental Short.

Bradly Dever Treadaway is a Brooklyn based artist, educator and curator utilizing lens-based image making, moving images, sound, sculpture, installation and performance to comment on the breakdown of intergenerational communication and broken familial links due to natural disaster, technological evolution, mental health challenges, societal shifts and the continuance of interpersonal detachment occurring within American communities. His work is visualized through archival interventions, recontextualizing the archive to serve as form, medium, subject matter and concept, elevating domestic ephemera and rituals while questioning material significance within the photographic medium. Treadaway creates memorials, monuments and mnemonic devices to illustrate ancestral collisions with contemporary responses. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, The International Center of Photography,The Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, Agora Gallery in Chelsea, NY, The Mobile Museum of Art, The Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence, Italy, and the Lishui Museum of Photography in China. His film/video work has been screened at the New Orleans Film Festival, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia, Union Docs, Anthology Film Archives, the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival, the Nashville Film Festival, the Coney Island Film Festival, and at the Brooklyn Arts Council’s Scene: Brooklyn. Treadaway’s work has been curated by Vince Aletti, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jon Feinstein and Julian Cox and is part of the permanent collections at The Center for Photography at Woodstock, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Masur Museum of Art, the Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee, the Brooklyn Public Library and the Mobile Museum of Art. Treadaway has recently held residencies at Trestle Art Space and BRIC Media Arts in Brooklyn, Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and the Contemporary Arts Center at Woodside in NY.