Let's say sometime in the deep future, archeologists stumble upon a room in what used to be Downtown Las Vegas and discover Bradley Corman's tooled-aluminum wall sculptures at what used to be Dust Gallery. Imagine the lively discussion these works might provoke in scholarly publications, whatever such things might be in that world—footnoted telepathic exchanges (if you believe in progress), scrawlings on pressed reeds (if you don't).
Some might argue that Corman's exquisite, linear scorings of gently curving aluminum panels constitute a language system. They would point, perhaps, to evidence from other sites of a communication form consisting of short lines in inscrutable, rhythmic repetitions, attached to nearly every trade commodity in our (lost) world. Those lines, however, are flat, black and vertical. Corman's horizontal indentations also are equal in length while they vary in width, but it seems crucial that they taper at their ends, the record of intersecting parabolas. They are runes, perhaps, or codes to the operation of machines, found near the Dust excavation, with spinning wheels of likewise cryptic symbols.
Those scholars would exhaust the Global Warming Age without stumbling upon Corman's explanation—assuming, of course, that the artist's statement was lost to history. From that statement, present-day gallery-goers learn that the title of Corman's show, Modern Archeo, refers to the artist's fascination with the marks left by machines. The title brings to mind a future's mining of the past, but in Corman's hands the scrapes, scratches and gouges of our tooled world, whether determined or serendipitous, have been flattened, straightened and rigorously arranged into parallel troughs.
Corman's minimalist panels are pristine artifacts, both in two-panel pairings such as "Untitled, Silver over Orange" or "Untitled, Black and Silver," and in bricklike arrays, such as the wall-filling "Untitled, Silver." Their ionized alloy surfaces gleam weakly, and reflections glide over their edges as they would over creased satin. You might find yourself taking sidelong views of the channels tooled into the aluminum or comparing the rhythms of their sequences. In "Untitled, Green over Black," for instance, the order of lines mirrors itself on either side of a wide channel, but in "Untitled, Silver over Orange," the widths and interstices are different in each of the two panels. And you begin to understand the conceit about distinctive machined imprints, about how the pattern of widths and gaps betrays a specific origin—in the forensic sense, as a rifle barrel scores each bullet.
No doubt more than a few people who take in Corman's show will also see something of a companion statement two doors down, Tim Bavington's show at G-C Arts. Bavington's vertical stripes, painted and printed, correspond to musical tones. Corman, also a graduate of UNLV's art program, manifests a similar interest in a dispassionate beauty. Both artists work hard to eliminate evidence of their labors from their work, and both accent their rigidly minimalist approach with a twist of concept. Corman's archival-inkjet prints, however, suggest dimension and depth in the illusion of glare dispersed over rounded surfaces, whereas Bavington's prints document the concept, not the look, of his paintings.
But the idea that underpins Corman's sculptures is about the palpable reality of machine-made marks, and his prints clearly represent objects. Corman's sculptures have about them the air of Modernist enterprise, the making of elegant, rarified, sui-generis forms. Even when the panels are used as bricks in larger compositions, they express the simple clarity of streamlined forms building bigger objects. The submersion of human agency in the making of marks might seem to contrast with that physical reality, but instead it betokens ... well, craftsmanship. There's a concept.
Corman arranges these panels in varied configurations, one broad rectangle above another, or slender bricks building larger compositions. In "Untitled, Black & Silver," the colors divide in a stairstep pattern. In "Untitled, Silver," the scored "bricks" come in three lengths, and they come together in a composition that is at once orderly and chaotic, densely packed in places, diffuse toward the far-flung edges. More than any other work here, it prompts you to consider how patterns build patterns, even if nothing like a pattern is immediately evident. Everything leaves a mark, and these blocks of evidence are the elements of larger, more complex, orders of experience.
That might seem like a lot to ask of objects so simple and straightforward. But what else are you to do with a room full of vaguely art-deco grille panels? You can marvel at the lovely refinement, just this side of recherché, or you can take the artist's statement and run with it. Concept layers meaning over the artwork, but not in the way iconography embeds it. Truth is not beauty, as in Keats' famous formula, but rather something like its trusty sidekick.