Brandon Vickerd
Oblivion (Dead Astronaut #2)
2019

Name: Oblivion (Dead Astronaut #2)
Brand: Brandon Vickerd
Price: 80000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Purposely diverse, my work straddles the line between high and low culture, acting as a catalyst for critical thought and addressing the failed promise of a modernist future predicated on boundless scientific advancement. Whether through craftsmanship, the creation of spectacle, or humour, my goal is to provoke the viewer into questioning the dominate myth of progress ingrained in Western world views. A satellite resting lifeless in a crater, recalling a modern day Icarus whose faith in technology lead to hubris and imminent demise as he fell back to earth; a ghost clad in chrome, cloaked in the reflective guise of the machine it seems fit to haunt; machines sporting deer antlers and locked in never ending combat – these are just some of the motifs I utilize to articulate my concerns about technology and failure. Elements of this work appear as wonderfully crude relics of past visions of the future, as vehicles or potential doomsday weapons mirroring the excesses of the cold war and the space race, while also recalling proto-modernist sculpture of the same period. I attempt to highlight our nostalgia for a past, when science held the promise of a limitless future, and not the very strange and often frightening world of tomorrow we find ourselves living in today. My work is a lexicon of no-longer-relevant representation created with a critical eye towards modernism, but also empathy for a tarnished idealism. In the past several years my exhibited projects have been diverse in form and content, including site specific interventions, kinetic sculpture, public performances and object based sculpture. My public installations deliberately do not reveal themselves as sculpture, but seek to insert an anomaly into the viewer’s experience of the everyday. Projects such as Northern Satellite trigger a discourse centered on our conflicting ways of understanding landscape by creating a narrative where a Global Positioning Satellite has collided with the earth. In gallery exhibitions I engage the audience through employing the language of monumental figurative sculpture by subverting dominant cultural narratives by creating monuments to popular culture characters (Dead Astronaut, …he was turned to steel…”), or by subverting expectations of the monument through intervention (Columbus). My most recent series Chopper evolved from my training in custom motorcycle shops, where I engaged new materials and processes gleaned from masters of the craft. Chopper borrows from motorcycle culture, mimicking the sparse exoskeletons of 1960s machines. Providing a feeling of propulsion, the sculptures in this series seem to be haunted by a lapsed future. In the gleaming hardness of custom paint and polished steel is the faint reflection of the failed project of the futurists and utopian dreamers.

Creator:

Brandon Vickerd (1977, Canadian)

Creation Year:

2019

Dimensions:

Height: 89 in (226.06 cm)Width: 35 in (88.9 cm)Depth: 36 in (91.44 cm)

Medium:

Bronze

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

2010-