Sputnik 1 embedded into auto. Artist Brandon Vickerd with his clash/crash of cultures.  Photo courtesy: Artcite/Nick Brancaccio/The Windsor Star

Sputnik 1 embedded into auto. Artist Brandon Vickerd with his clash/crash of cultures.
Photo courtesy: Artcite/Nick Brancaccio/The Windsor Star

 

There’s an “artistic bent” to the works of Brandon Vickerd – a Toronto-based sculptor.

Outside of Artcite Inc. of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, a replica of the former Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1– the first human-made satellite to orbit Earth – sits embedded into a parked car.

The Sputnik Returned #2 artwork by Vickerd is viewable from June 6 – August 1, 2015. It is an anchor exhibition for Summer Arts Fest 2015.

Vickerd is a professor of Visual Arts at York University and has done a number of pieces involving spacecraft.

Metaphor artwork

According to Art Mûr, a Canadian art gallery that represents Vickerd, an earlier Sputnik Returned work is called a metaphor “for the failed promises of a future predicated on scientific advancement,” according to the Art Mûr site.

Credit: Brandon Vickerd

Credit: Brandon Vickerd

“The stainless steel orb, resting lifeless in a crater recalls a modern day Icarus, whose faith in technology lead to hubris and imminent demise as he fell back to earth. This simple design, streamlined and reflective, seems to encapsulate the space race of the 1950s. Today this design appears as a wonderfully crude relic of the period, a potential unmanned doomsday weapon mirroring the excesses of the cold war while also recalling the proto-modernist sculptures of Brancusi.”

Other Vickerd works include Satellite – a 2009 sculpture that is a full scale replica of a grounded Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite. AstroMonkey is a 2012 piece, while Northern Satellite in 2009 appears to depict a Voyager spacecraft that’s taken a nosedive into terra firma.

Credit: Brandon Vickerd

Credit: Brandon Vickerd

High and low culture

In an artist’s statement posted by Vickerd, he shares some of his views that stirred his works: “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 humor, my goal is to provoke the viewer into questioning the dominate myth of progress ingrained in Western world views.”

Credit: Brandon Vickerd

Credit: Brandon Vickerd

Elements of his works, Vickerd adds, “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.”

Credit: Brandon Vickerd

Credit: Brandon Vickerd

Resources

To take a close-up look at Sputnik Returned #2 and other artwork that’s part of the Summer Arts Fest 2015, Artcite is located in a storefront space in the Capitol Theatre and Arts Center in Windsor’s downtown core. The gallery is open 12:00 noon through 5:00 PM, Wednesdays through Saturdays.

Artcite is a non-profit, Artist-run Centre for the Contemporary Arts, dedicated exclusively to expanding the visibility of contemporary arts and advancing the professional presentation, promotion and animation of contemporary art forms.

Go to: http://www.artcite.ca/

For Brandon Vickerd’s website, go to:

http://brandonvickerd.com/

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