Brandon Vickerd Figurative Sculptures

Glitch Bear (model) is a preliminary model for a life size sculpture of a bear, that will appear distorted by a digital glitch, as if a corrupted digital image has willed itself into...

Challenger consists of a replica of the escape hatch from the NASA space shuttle installed as if it has fallen from the sky and flattened a Canada P...

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 ...

I am interested in how we collectively construct history through artifacts such as monuments and portrait bust. These devices are tools for constructing dominant historical narrativ...

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 ...

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 ...

Brandon Vickerd has in the past explored anthropomorphic hybridity and technological impetus through taxidermy and mechanics. For the Wrong Place, Wrong Time exhibition, the artist revisits these themes, this time putting bronze casting in the spotlight. Vickerd imagines anachronistic and incongruous juxtapositions of this material, which is reminiscent of both antique statuary and modern public monuments. These associations provoke laughter or discomfort, and they detonate in the space of the gallery as well as in the urban setting in which a large part of its production is destined. This is undoubtedly where the contextual and temporal inconsistencies evoked by the title of the exhibition reside. Inspired by the material tradition of bronze, the artist relies heavily on references to Greek mythology, which he likes to subvert. With Atlas (2019), Vickerd makes a reversal of the famous story of the bearer of the globe. Rather than bravely supporting the weight of the world, the Titan seems assailed by multiple spheres that hide the top of his body, leaving only his distinguished shoes and his dress pants. The sculpture Flora Hominis (2019) illustrates a transitional state between the human and the plant whose detail evokes the metamorphosis of the nymph Daphne into a tree, once immortalized by Bernini. The artist presents here a fragmentary study of this monument commissioned by the Royal Botanical Gardens of Burlington, Ontario. While the statue aims to honor the founder of the place, the latter is made paradoxically unrecognizable by the vegetation that proliferates on his face. In this way, Vickerd replaces the heroic celebration of his subjects with a partial occultation of their identity. The sculptor deftly adjusts to classic themes the signifiers of the disappointed promises of modernist ideology. On the 50th anniversary of the first US moon landing, Oblivion (Dead Astronaut...

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...

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...

Brandon Vickerd has in the past explored anthropomorphic hybridity and technological impetus through taxidermy and mechanics. For the Wrong Place, Wrong Time exhibition, the artist revisits these themes, this time putting bronze casting in the spotlight. Vickerd imagines anachronistic and incongruous juxtapositions of this material, which is reminiscent of both antique statuary and modern public monuments. These associations provoke laughter or discomfort, and they detonate in the space of the gallery as well as in the urban setting in which a large part of its production is destined. This is undoubtedly where the contextual and temporal inconsistencies evoked by the title of the exhibition reside. Inspired by the material tradition of bronze, the artist relies heavily on references to Greek mythology, which he likes to subvert. With Atlas (2019), Vickerd makes a reversal of the famous story of the bearer of the globe. Rather than bravely supporting the weight of the world, the Titan seems assailed by multiple spheres that hide the top of his body, leaving only his distinguished shoes and his dress pants. The sculpture Flora Hominis (2019) illustrates a transitional state between the human and the plant whose detail evokes the metamorphosis of the nymph Daphne into a tree, once immortalized by Bernini. The artist presents here a fragmentary study of this monument commissioned by the Royal Botanical Gardens of Burlington, Ontario. While the statue aims to honor the founder of the place, the latter is made paradoxically unrecognizable by the vegetation that proliferates on his face. In this way, Vickerd replaces the heroic celebration of his subjects with a partial occultation of their identity. The sculptor deftly adjusts to classic themes the signifiers of the disappointed promises of modernist ideology. On the 50th anniversary of the first US moon landing, Oblivion (Dead Astronaut...

Brandon Vickerd has in the past explored anthropomorphic hybridity and technological impetus through taxidermy and mechanics. For the Wrong Place, Wrong Time exhibition, the artist revisits these themes, this time putting bronze casting in the spotlight. Vickerd imagines anachronistic and incongruous juxtapositions of this material, which is reminiscent of both antique statuary and modern public monuments. These associations provoke laughter or discomfort, and they detonate in the space of the gallery as well as in the urban setting in which a large part of its production is destined. This is undoubtedly where the contextual and temporal inconsistencies evoked by the title of the exhibition reside. Inspired by the material tradition of bronze, the artist relies heavily on references to Greek mythology, which he likes to subvert. With Atlas (2019), Vickerd makes a reversal of the famous story of the bearer of the globe. Rather than bravely supporting the weight of the world, the Titan seems assailed by multiple spheres that hide the top of his body, leaving only his distinguished shoes and his dress pants. The sculpture Flora Hominis (2019) illustrates a transitional state between the human and the plant whose detail evokes the metamorphosis of the nymph Daphne into a tree, once immortalized by Bernini. The artist presents here a fragmentary study of this monument commissioned by the Royal Botanical Gardens of Burlington, Ontario. While the statue aims to honor the founder of the place, the latter is made paradoxically unrecognizable by the vegetation that proliferates on his face. In this way, Vickerd replaces the heroic celebration of his subjects with a partial occultation of their identity. The sculptor deftly adjusts to classic themes the signifiers of the disappointed promises of modernist ideology. On the 50th anniversary of the first US moon landing, Oblivion (Dead Astronaut...

The term illumination can be defined as an observable property and effect of light, as well as the process by which human thought is transformed and expanded. Illumination in the phi...

The term illumination can be defined as an observable property and effect of light, as well as the process by which human thought is transformed and expanded. Illumination in the phi...

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 ...