Bradford Lovett: "Myths & Hymns"
March 21, 2024
The Parlour
In Bradford Lovett’s Gaythering at the Fam Farm, a disembodied hand reaches down from the sky with a pink donut in its fingers, almost making contact with jubilant tongues rising from little floating Mario clouds. A dude with gold-plated pecs sits next to a man in white shirtsleeves who’s groaning over a cauldron full of bones, with two apocalyptic creatures in shiny red boots poised nearby and a slain Goliath in the foreground. A pair of cows holds space with a ballerina and a giant frosted cupcake as a witch-hatted Boy Scout rolls by on a recumbent wooden bike and a dragon carries a bound figure away over the peak of a falling-down barn.
These forms—felled, flirty, familiar, fantastical—are meticulously hand-cut and collaged by Lovett out of his vast collection of magazines, (porno)graphic ephemera and old Mormon art. (Originally from West Texas, he grew up in the Mormon church and spent time in Tulsa and Washington, D.C., before returning here recently.) The oil painting that’s the backdrop for this scene was a gift from a friend whose grandmother—“no friend to the queers,” said the friend—painted it. Lovett accepted the canvas as a challenge, queering this bucolic space with a population that includes both frolicsome fun and the real stuff of transformation. “I only use what I can find,” Lovett told me. “That’s part of the challenge.”
Gaythering at the Fam Farm was one of about a dozen pieces in Lovett’s recent show “Myths & Hymns,” which turned the refined walls of Trueson and Zia Daugherty’s home into a serious/delirious queer revolutionary romp. Large-scale scenes like this hung near smaller works the size of religious icons, all ornately framed, each remixing existing forms with a curious, loving, exuberant, literally iconoclastic hand.
“This show integrates a somewhat-tortured religious past with a vision for a queer future full of rowdy joy,” said Lovett’s artist statement. “Myths teach moral values, galvanize communities and commemorate icons past. These portraits are an imagined (previously unrecorded!) queer lineage: our saints and our elders. ‘Hymns’ acknowledges that sometimes, no matter how far we run or how much we grow, our brains are still programmed like the little religious kids we used to be. Happily, ‘a hymn is any song we choose to live our lives to.’”
With their gleefully disruptive juxtapositions, breathtaking skill with spatial perspective, and keenly balanced composition, his large pieces invite comparisons to Hieronymous Bosch and Kent Monkman. Lovett himself says Bruegel is a strong influence, with his affection for everyday things and his wide-angle scenes that, like Lovett’s, allow space to scan for small details and wonder about (or irreverently invent) relationships. At the same time, as he builds out a pantheon of characters to rival the endless genealogies (A begot B begot C, etc.) from the mythologies he was raised in, you can see Lovett’s inner kid self at work here, too.