Brandon Vickerd

Chrome Ghost

2007

Brandon Vickerd’s current show at Art Mûr brings together three sculptural pieces that undress and re-situate the Chopper: that iconic assertion of individuality, masculinity, and speed, pushed to new levels through mechanical re-imagining. Biker culture itself is something of a hidden universe for the uninitiated, and yet it’s omnipresent in the badass archetypes that have never really left the Hollywood screen. The mechanic’s shop now shares that space, too, with TV shows like American Chopper reinforcing what Vickerd sees as a current reverence for hyper craftsmanship, in a society that is quickly losing the need or will to continue to create by hand. The Chopper series has come out of years of training in custom bike shops, where Vickerd learned the new materials and processes from masters of the craft. The style is clearly automotive; its exoskeletal form mimics the exposed mechanics of motorcycles. There is that shared technique, a precise handling of steel, fibreglass, and car paint. But otherwise they are abstracted out of mechanical use or recognition. Chopper 1 captures the exaggerated length of its namesake. The piercing length and height of the piece stretches its physical reach, to the corners of the room. The work is supported by a stylized kickstand, re-enforcing its top-down direction. Chopper 2 is tight and muscular—engine-like—buzzing with pent-up energy, and the promise of propulsion. Chopper 3, less contained, seems ready to fly to pieces. As art objects, they are striking. As machines, they are decommissioned. These works’ promise of speed, agility, and rebellion are locked away as wayward desires. But brought together in this space, they seem poised and ready to use their audience as grounders to come alive. The un-crowded installation allows the necessary space for visitors to negotiate their relationship to the objects and the physical surroundings. This acknowledgement of relationship—between person, architecture, and objects— in Chopper’s sparse installation has a 60’s minimalist sensitivity. At the same time the sculptures themselves have the aftertaste of an old future. In the gleaming (and maybe just a bit rusty) hardness of these chrome bodies is the faint reflection of the failed project of futurists and utopian dreamers. Chopper brings visitors into a more intimate proximity with their environment—both physical and cultural. As with Dead Astronaut...

Brandon Vickerd’s current show at Art Mûr brings together three sculptural pieces that undress and re-situate the Chopper: that iconic assertion of individuality, masculinity, and sp...

The four life size figurative sculptures in Monuments of a Perfect Future are derived from low brow culture narratives, detailing stories of extra-terrestrial travel, heroic tales originating from science fiction, and mythology rooted in comic book narratives. Presenting a collision of high art materials (bronze, steel, wood) with pop culture imagery, this body of sculpture examines the division between high art and popular culture. This series of new sculptures originate from research conducted while attending San Diego Comic-Con (2013) as well as deriving inspiration from the master figurative sculptors Augustus Rodin and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Monumentality speaks in the language of absolutes; the exhibition Monuments of a Perfect Future subverts the idea of absolutes through undermining monumental motifs with irony, humor and pathos. Ultimately, these works examine the tragic failure of the characters represented, as well as the failed myth of unending progress promised by modernism and technological advancement. Brandon Vickerd is a Toronto based sculptor and Professor of Visual Arts at York University. He received his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1999) and his MFA from the University of Victoria (2001). In the past several years his exhibited projects have been diverse in form and content, including site specific interventions, public performances and object based sculpture. Projects such as Dance of the Cranes (Toronto, 2009) and Dance of the Cranes, Requiem for Architecture (Brooklyn, 2012) are community based projects outside the gallery that seek to transform the cityscape into a stage for performance. These performances consist of choreographed dances executed by high-rise construction cranes perched upon condo developments while viewers watch from the street bellow. Public works such as Satellite and Northern Satellite are similar attempts to engage the public in a discourse about our conflicting ways of understanding landscape. In gallery exhibitions he engages the audience through employing the language of monumental figurative sculpture subverting dominant cultural narratives by creating monuments to popular culture characters (Dead Astronaut...

The sculpture Cranium (2020) is an exploration of consciousness in isolation. It re-imagines the human skull as an ever-expanding container, complete with its own internalized logic...

Laughter, discomfort, perplexity: these are all plausible reactions to the work by sculptor Cal Lane. The artist’s most recent body of work is an affective assemblage of incongruous parts that, taken together, violate our mental patterns and expectations. Charged with contradictions, metaphor, sexual undertones, and unsettling associations, Lane’s unlikely combinations use absurdity as a way of pointing to western society’s normalized habits and conventions, often with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. For the exhibition Try Me, Lane installs a basketball court in the gallery. The two basketball hoops on opposing walls are embellished with silver-coated frames and lustrous mirrors, which serve as decorative backboards. In place of nets, women’s black lace underwear delicately hang from hoops. A decorative rug stenciled with court lines performs as the court floor. It is a mise-en-scène set in motion by viewer’s reconciliation of the individual parts to the whole, and to their original function. Panties regard themselves in the mirror or perhaps measure up their opponent, which, not without irony, is the mirror image of itself. Themes of gender and sexuality are performed and imagined in the upward voyeuristic gaze of the viewer and the expected swoosh of the ball into the net. This is further elaborated by phallic impressions formed by court lines and their likeness to a work of modernist abstraction—a movement wrought by notions of masculinity. The decorative rug’s connection to femininity and domesticity juxtaposes the rigid geometry. Lane further explores the historical gendering of technology, industry, and war in her series of wallpaper drawings, which depict war submarines on cloud patterned wallpaper. The innocence of the submarine in popular culture and its reality as a phallic war object...

Brandon Vickerd is a Hamilton based artist and Professor of Sculpture at York University, where he also serves as Chair of the Department of Visual Arts and Art History. He received ...

From the artifacts of Leonardo Da Vinci, to the mythical Icarus and the innumerable inventions of NASA, the human being does not stop manifesting one of its deepest desires: to fly. ...

The direct inspiration for this piece is a bird and its ability to hover in the air. This animal, admired by men since ancient times, seems to make no effort when taking flight. It r...

In a fast-paced world where we often get caught up in the rush, it’s easy to lose sight of what truly matters. Tempus serves as a reminder to live in the present and cherish each mom...

Cadence is the rhythm or repetition of certain phenomena, such as sounds or movements. The best reference in the design of this piece could well be the musical pentagram, with its co...

The arrow has a great symbolic meaning, related to elements of different natures such as protection, love, hunt, and orientation. "Ero" refers to this as an evolution symbol and the ...

ALINA plays with contrasts between order and disordered. Although its external form is ordered and symmetrical, the opposite happens inside: there are no patterns or logical order. I...