Bridge Freezes Before Road accompanied the group exhibition of the same name, curated by Neville Wakefield at Gladstone in 2005, and features an essay by Wakefield as well. 

 

For his view of emerging trends in international art, Wakefield takes a road sign and poses it as a tabloid headline. It is the story of accidents waiting to happen. Marking paths of terrestrial migration, it warns of the perils of narrative, the dangers of elevation, the skid and slide of the unforeseen journey. Combining painting, sculpture, installation, and video, the works on view showcase a roster of new and familiar voices in all media, including Lali Chetwynd, Banks Violette, Martin Kippenberger, Dan Colen, and others. Surface as fetish, craft as obsession, the artists here, though disparate, relish in the degradation of the known and the perversion of the easy commodity.

 

Assembled within are works that span divides of generation and media. Narratives frozen in time are also to be found in states of decay, foundering as it were, on the roadside of progress. While possibly confronting globalism and capitalism, many of these works take the face-value of surface for what it may not seem: beneath the fetish of commodity is a mythology recalling perversions of both intellectualism and low-brow culture. “Bridge Freezes before Road” is a landscape of broken connections. Signposting the way are images and objects—bullets and cannonballs, gnomes and militia, hugs and drugs—an entropic trail of the living and the dead.