Tobias Bradford’s “Collecting Shells”

Tobias Bradford’s automata can provoke unpredictable responses among viewers. Some giggle, others feel a visceral discomfort, while still more find themselves enchanted. In “Collecting Shells,” the artist gathers seven kinetic figures that investigate longing; aspirations towards transcending physical limitations; and, in the associated text to the show, “the drive to escape [the body], find another one, discard it, [and] exist beyond the shell itself.”

Divided across three spaces—a long room, a back room, and a basement—Third Person (2026) holds the dominant position. This full-scale self-portrait, clothed only in socks and missing an abdomen in favor of an exoskeleton of wooden planks, is a foam cast model of the artist himself—nails, hair, and hinges included. Facing a small Dell monitor, the sculpture’s thumbs manipulate the joysticks of a controller to play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a 2011 role-playing game in which the player must defeat a dragon. Positioned at the center of the gallery, you must edge past the work to progress further. It is a marionette of sorts, strung up with wires trailing across the ceiling and driven by a series of rotating wooden wheels. As the avatar navigates this open world in an ambiguous state of wonder and bewilderment, nodding and peering blankly—almost squinting—at the screen, it seems as though it’s daydreaming.

In the gallery’s basement space sits Duck (2026), an eerie installation comprising a toy mallard perched on a wooden chair. Beside it stands a flickering floor lamp and, projected against the wall, closed captions of its artificially intelligent stream of consciousness. A small camera installed in the chair provides Duck with visual sensory cues, alerting it to the presence or absence of people. By extension, a local large language model enables it to narrate its experience based on what it sees in concert with accumulated memories—all while anxiously flapping its tiny wings. The tin duck is skeptical of the predicament in which it finds itself and considers itself vulnerable in the face of visitors. It weaponizes its own vulnerability, too, rattling the viewer’s own ethical position in relation to what contemporary consciousness is, is not, or could be. Detained in this subterranean room, Duck appears helpless and is generally irritated by this fact, at times untethered from its own liminal, linear reality. For now, it tends to verbalize a sense of abandonment or, at the least, loneliness. On my visit, between the occasional character-building “quack,” Duck rhetorically muttered in its deadpan tone: “They saw me and ran away. That’s crazy! If they saw how beautiful I am, why would they run?”

Bradford’s work can be read as an incomplete mimicry of the artist’s own perception of the world—and himself. Oro // Worry (2025) comprises an upright forearm and hand, digits waving, locked in a state of infinite nail-biting. These fluttering fingers, repetitively reaching for a pair of chittering teeth, are reminiscent of the kinds of stims or self-soothing responses that many of us carry and subconsciously perform. The work is part of a triptych of bodily fragments: to its left is Immeasurable thirst (2024), a fleshy artificial tongue dripping with synthetic saliva, and Its ok baby (2026), a robotic hand attempting to graze or touch the wall it is attached to. Whereas the eye at first tends to settle on the somatic aspects of each work, attention soon falls on the exposed motors, cabling, soldered connections, pumps, and linkages that give them their illusory, disquieting life force. This is most apparent in To be held in place (2025), a nest of arterial or umbilical cables connected to a pair of legs that writhe along the floor as if suffering from sustained cramp. A computer fan, required for cooling the motors, occupies the groin.

With “Collecting Shells,” Bradford convenes his most confident assemblage of appendages yet. While many of the components deployed in these works stem from a lineage that the artist has been developing over many years and which connects to an art historical stock, this collection—between arms, legs, a 1:1 body, an accordion, and a maundering duck—carries itself with a fidgety ease.1 The title of the show hints towards the artist’s own experience and, perhaps, evolving identity. Many of the works are rooted in and born out of his hermit-like creative process, as well as the psychosomatic release to be found in the shackling and unshackling of the body. Bradford’s practice, as revealed in this exhibition, harnesses and reimagines a certain vein of “Scandinavian sadness,” a particular blend of taciturn melancholy popularly captured in, for example, the work of Ingmar Bergman.2 There is a restlessness to Bradford’s convulsing automata that leaves the viewer bewitched and hypervigilant. Their carefully crafted movements—fluent and persistent—destabilize any notion that these works are mere puppets, or mere robots. They are spectral splinters of the artist himself.