Art / “Resonant”, Julie Bradley. At Belco Arts, until August 20. Reviewed by ROB KENNEDY.

THE 2020 “CityNews” Artist of the Year, Julie Bradley, who works with collage and drawing on paper, has a colourful and catchy exhibition that looks at the effect music has on visual art.

Always a big part of Bradley’s life, music has helped shape the 25 works in this exhibition titled “Resonant”, in the Pivot Gallery at Belco Arts. So connected to music is Bradley, she recently joined Rachel Hore’s “Pop up Choir” to help her consider how music alters her perception as an artist.

Music and visual art are sister arts. Both inform and lean into one another to create new voices and styles that can form a circle of art with never-ending possibilities.

“Ekphrasis” is an ancient Greek word that means to seek out and phrase one form of art into another. This is what Bradley has done but through a catchy geometric philosophy with a bright, highly coloured palette.

Several smaller works are similar, seemingly sequential, but with strongly varying titles and ideas expressed in each. The ones that stand out are the singular works; they grab the most attention. “Meet me in the long grass”, perhaps a musical title, is a drawing of many parts. The background and foreground generate the most attention through their strong, equally prominent designs. Their difference, combined with the geometrical patterns and size, pull a viewer in.

Many works are filled with one of the most powerful design aspects in all visual art, the diagonal. Not just slanting lines, but the constructed placement of objects set up to align visual diagonals in the negative space and foreground prominent objects.

The diagonal is a compositional concept that creates unseen energy and balance throughout many renowned artworks. In Bradley’s drawings, the concept of the diagonal is strong, which frames an aesthetic that pleases while being mysterious and prevailing at the same time.

Another standout work, this one with a direct musical title, “In four parts”, which refers to four-part writing that is prominent in choral music, which consists of the four major voices, soprano, alto, tenor and bass, uses a combination of halved and off-centre circles, spiralling larger thin circles and diagonal lines set in groups of four. While the choice of a five-line diagonal may have better represented a musical stave, this is a stunning drawing that works on many levels.

Along with the highly coloured artworks in the other new exhibitions at Belco Arts, all opened on the same night, Bradley’s drawings show an artist concentrating on the connections that open up new thinking and new avenues to create enduring and explorative creations that yield intriguing results.