Cultural Fossils and Contemporary Relics

By Brant Kingman

My sculpture manifests my view of how we fit in time. I invented two forms of expression to address this conceptual query: Cultural Fossils and Contemporary Relics. Both forms are directly inspired by my observations of nature.

My Cultural Fossils are assemblages of three-dimensional objects that create tangible dream-like images of our cultural condition that appear to be archaeological snapshots of the moment in relief. They contain impressions of the mass-produced, ready-made images that have flooded our lives. In them we see images as exotic as Indonesian garudas and as common as paper clips. Plastic millipedes, lizards, and snakes, and real sea shells, seed pods, and fern fronds represent some of the more enduring forms of life whose impressions I have woven between religious and pop icons. In my Cultural Fossils the real and unreal are easily confused. Just when you think you see the impression of a real insect, "Made in China" appears on the thorax.

Cultural Fossils report, they don't judge. Religious icons and pop imagery are equally well represented. Faces from Egypt, Rome, and Mad Magazine provide their profile or face us head on. Ancient Chinese fire-breathing dragons compete with contemporary cartoon characters for the honor of your attention. Coins, corporate logos, and letters lie scattered about. Sometimes my Cultural Fossils are organized, other times they appear to be as randomly laid down as the effluent of a great river. And this is what I intended: to have them look like fluvial deposits from the great river of time. You can find Cultural Fossils on the surfaces of my free standing sculptures and in the portions of my reliefs that appear to be emerging from behind chipped walls.

I call my free standing, broken, bent, and incomplete sculptures Contemporary Relics in an effort to point out that everything we make, no matter how new, is a relic from the moment of its creation. I deliberately degenerate these sculptures, reducing classical forms to their most identifiable and durable essence. My creations focus on the most recognizable of all images: the human figure and one of humankind's earliest creations, the vessel. I see the vessel as a symbol of culture. But the relationship between the vessel and the body is more profound.

The body is a vessel made by God to deliver and store life itself. . The vessel is made by man to transport and store life-giving substances. My figures are not about bodies, I sculpt them to show that it is the impossible-to-sculpt internal essence that intrigues me. I intentionally assemble my forms with pieces missing so that the interior surfaces are nearly as visually accessible as the exterior ones.

The missing pieces serve other functions. They are a metaphorical reminder of the gaps in our understanding of history. We never have the complete story. We put the evidence we have together and call it “the truth” or “reality.” But our understanding of truth and reality are always flawed and have pieces missing. These missing pieces also make my works look fragile. Bronze is thought to be an ideal material for monuments that “last forever.” I question this notion and suggest that our best efforts to memorialize will ultimately be fragile reminders.

Cultural Fossils comprise the surface of the majority of my Contemporary Relics. The imagery on the surface and the shape of the form itself generate a dialogue that becomes more poignant when it is studied from a variety of perspectives. From a distance you see one thing, but when you get close up, you realize what you see is vastly more complex. Here you find agreement with our present scientific point of view: the universe expands infinitely.

This discovery makes people pause. Time is felt in the pauses. In our contemporary lifestyle we have lost our sense of having time because we fail to pause. - Yet we discover our connection to nature and feel our place in time by pausing to reflect and observe.