Menu
The New Contemporary Art Magazine

Brad Blair Sculpts Monstrosities out of Clay and Mixed Media

Baltimore, Maryland based artist Brad Blair designs imaginative sculptural monstrosities that combine features of real world animals with those from our dreams and nightmares. His works are an elaborate mixture of media, made of primarily clay and ceramic, natural parts like fox tails and fish fins, rubber cast tongues, and mechanical elements like watches and monofilament, giving them a certain science-fiction or cyborg quality.

Baltimore, Maryland based artist Brad Blair designs imaginative sculptural monstrosities that combine features of real world animals with those from our dreams and nightmares. His works are an elaborate mixture of media, made of primarily clay and ceramic, natural parts like fox tails and fish fins, rubber cast tongues, and mechanical elements like watches and monofilament, giving them a certain science-fiction or cyborg quality.

Blair’s creatures typically share avian and reptilian features, some beaked like a vulture and simultaneously sporting curved fangs that makes them look intimidating, while others have delightfully abstract faces with big lips and googley-eyed expressions inspired by insect larvae. Their Frankenstein-like appearance can be attributed to the artist’s concerns about modern day genetic engineering and biotechnology, who says that his goal is to open the minds of his viewers and transport them into a different reality- the unknown.

“Monsters were and still are used to control, deter, challenge, inspire, threaten and seduce human beings in different situations,” Blair says in his artist statement. “By using the power of the unknown and the mysterious, the visceral urge to touch and a high level of detail, I lure the viewer in and make them want to investigate and question. These works are primarily made from clay with other elements added to help convey concept. They can be needy, invasive, harmful, helpful, curious, unpredictable, highly intelligent and oh so productive when ‘engineered’ correctly.”

Meta
Share
Facebook
Reddit
Pinterest
Email
Related Articles
Hugh Hayden shapes wood, sourced from Christmas trees, exotic timbers, or other unexpected objects, into cerebral recreations of everyday objects. He recently showed recent work at C L E A R I N G’s Brussels gallery, pulling from spiritual, historical, and other aspects of the city to craft the body of work shown. The artist often injects his own personal history into his work, whether in the subject depicted or in the very wood harvested and formed.
When digital painter and sculptor Danny van Ryswyk was eight years old, he had an unusual encounter with a UFO, an experience that continues to profoundly impact his artwork- illustrations and 3D printed sculptures of moody, Victorian-styled figures, often displayed in glass bell jars as if they were scientific specimens. Like that flying saucer from his childhood memory, Ryswyk's characters are darkly fantastical and strange, monochromatic figures that blend his unique interest in the meaning of dreams and the inexplicable like aliens and Victorian spirit photography.
She’s been dubbed as “the artist who can work anywhere”, and this is especially true of Crysal Wagner’s most recent installation, “Fall”. It can be found inside the campus of University of Tennessee, 4 stories of blue cascading down the school’s Art & Architecture building. “Fall” is exactly 60 feet tall, but its flowing mesh, made of party table clothes, chicken wire, and screen printing, feels almost never ending. More photos after the jump!
Italian sculptor Maurizio Cattelan has been a force of satire and provocativeness for the past few decades in the art world. He’s turned heads with sculptures of Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite, a praying Hitler in a former Warsaw Ghetto, and a taxidermied squirrel moments after suicide by self-inflicted gunshot. A new documentary, “Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back,” explores the life of the controversial artist.

Subscribe to the Hi-Fructose Mailing List