Shayne Dark

Strike blue

2003

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...

Bevan Ramsay completed his graduate degree in sculpture nearly a decade ago, but it's only now that he feels he has truly graduated from his MFA. This liberating feeling comes with a...

Bevan Ramsay completed his graduate degree in sculpture nearly a decade ago, but it's only now that he feels he has truly graduated from his MFA. This liberating feeling comes with a...

Place des Arts in Montreal is pleased to present Arnait by Karine Giboulo in its exhibition hall, a space for citizen reflection open to all. Central to her process is a friendship d...

Text by Terence Sharpe There is a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) when the character Hari commits suicide by drinking liquid oxygen. As she is not actually a human, but an artificial hybrid product of the mysterious planet and the protagonists’ memories, she heals rapidly and is alive again minutes later. Her choice to take her own life is poignant, seemingly the action of a being becoming aware of its hopeless infinitude. Her realization that while the men will die on the space station or elsewhere, her existence is that of immortality, a deeply alienating notion that causes her to seek her own destruction. The Montreal artist Guillaume Lachapelle has one work that prompts a sense of eternal alienation that echoes Hari’s tragedy. The work greets the viewer with a empty doorway flanked by clinically white bookshelves...

For years, Laurent Lamarche has questioned the relationship between nature and artifice by producing fictional living organisms. Lamarche’s practice explores the following question, ...

Acrylic on cast fiberglass

"Vertical Harmony and Vertical Symphony" stand as an awe-inspiring duo, weaving a narrative of contemporary splendor in every garden and outdoor sanctuary. These monumental sculpture...

This beautiful, contemporary mobile sculpture is made from steel with different moving parts that reflect the light and throw shadows on to the wall and t...

Fiberglass / Carbon Fibre Impregnated With Catalysed Polyester Resin Graphite Filled Acrylic Laquor On Filled Polyester Resin Base "Don Frost, sculptor, creator of completely unique...

Fiberglass / Carbon Fibre Impregnated With Catalysed Polyester Resin Graphite Filled Acrylic Laquor On Filled Polyester Resin Base "Don Frost, sculptor, creator of completely unique...

Fiberglass / Carbon Fibre Impregnated With Catalysed Polyester Resin Graphite Filled Acrylic Laquor On Filled Polyester Resin Base "Don Frost, sculptor, creator of completely unique...