Brandon Vickerd

Cranium

2020

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 ...

By Terence Sharpe Attacking the medium of sculpture from a position of almost anti-fine art clarity, Zeke Moores alters conceptions of how we relate to material and form. There is...

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...

“Man's profound gestural relationship to objects, which epitomizes his integration into the world, into social structures, can be a highly fulfilling one, and this fulfilment is discernible in the beauty - the 'style' - of the relationship in its reciprocity.” -Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1996) The cliché that “one man’s trash...

“Man's profound gestural relationship to objects, which epitomizes his integration into the world, into social structures, can be a highly fulfilling one, and this fulfilment is discernible in the beauty - the 'style' - of the relationship in its reciprocity.” -Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1996) The cliché that “one man’s trash...

“Man's profound gestural relationship to objects, which epitomizes his integration into the world, into social structures, can be a highly fulfilling one, and this fulfilment is discernible in the beauty - the 'style' - of the relationship in its reciprocity.” -Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (1996) The cliché that “one man’s trash...

Painted cast stainless steel, patinated bronze, granite base “It took two years of tireless experimentation for me to develop the process of casting paper into bronze, another seven...

There is a metaphorical interplay between the natural imagery international artist, Jennyfer Stratman, uses and its multiple meanings. While the human figure features strongly, it is...

Inspired by the Shoulder Stand in Yoga, aka Sarvangasan, Curiá brings an abstraction to the pose as the figure's legs morph into a wooden boat. The figure has a beautiful green pati...

Thierry Job was born in Marseille, France and currently lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He studied art at the School of Beaux Arts in Paris. His wo...

Thierry Job was born in Marseille, France and currently lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He studied art at the School of Beaux Arts in Paris. His wo...

Thierry Job was born in Marseille, France and currently lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He studied art at the School of Beaux Arts in Paris. His wo...