MY EDUCATION:
BFA, Sculpture, Metropolitan State University, 2006
Certificate of ECE-12th Grade Visual Art Education
A Wandering Artist, Teacher, Friend, and Human…
Suppose we consider the little commonplace materials of our lives as though they are beautiful artifacts, maybe we might gain an understanding of what we leave behind, the discards of our existence. Brian Rendon drives the discard as an abject aesthetic cushioned by the grotesque and cares for these throwaways as if they were a thing of beauty. His work comments upon the natural instincts to ignore what we wish to hide away from. The commonplace things or all too familiar objects we consistently toss away into the wasteland. A heaping mountain of waste that we push aside from ourselves hoping that it will just fade away and take care of itself and rapidly decay and go away, forever.
He is a material manipulator using everyday objects metaphorically to address our human condition and the push purge our emotional discourse away from who we are. With delicate care as though he is having a conversation through his process to effectively produce unfamiliar relationships and connections to the waste we produce and our emotional turmoil. He believes, fundamentally that we want to forget or displace traumas or complex emotions because we bring pain or remembrance of suffering. To expel or hide from this human condition to confront our past.
Brian Rendon pulls a web to connect these objects or artifacts as more than just the things we toss away, they become metaphorical, because we can not get rid of what we are and what makes us who we are. As it is easier to turn away from, or discard, to neglect it and even forget, the things we want to avoid. Rendon observes these instances as teaching moments or realizations to adjust perspectives. As possibilities to consider even the smallest mundane artifact of everyday life, could potentially become our utmost self-destructive and self-inflicted chaos.
His work intends to confront all too common tendencies to avoid emotional connections and attachments as if we are just passing through time and space. To have created a sense of play approach, Rendon investigates and explores the remarkable fun it can be to just play with the absurd abundance of worthless things. He experiments with the unrealized tangibility these unwanted substances have. Basically, he plays with trash! Yet considering how he draws from youthful times growing up poor having not much toys to play with he chose to be imaginative and tinker with the stuff around his home: boxes, fabrics, broken branches from trees and even food products to construct odd living room installations and drawings done with water and spices.
He transcends the traditional approach of art-making as a creative response through his process exploring a long going narrative to consider the options and divergent uses for what we over-use.
Be it from complex emotions, environmental catastrophes, existing in a physical body attempting perfect, or simply… an inconvenience of having something not needed, or wanted, his work doesn’t let us avoid what needs to be healed. Because we can’t fix anything by throwing away what’s uncomfortable and not paying attention to where it or where we came from only burdens us, to develop a more sensible sense of place we have to confront the horrors of what gives us the unique as well as dualistic human qualities to bring forth the beautiful chaos of who we are or can be. It is in a sense the stuff that makes us whole.