Reception: Saturday, September 13, 2025, from 3 to 5 p.m.
Brandon Vickerd: Phantom Pain
The expression phantom limb describes the persistent sensation of a missing body part. It suggests an unresolved tension, a yearning for something that once was and has since been lost. Reframing this concept as a metaphor for the unfulfilled promises of technofuturism, artist Brandon Vickerd challenges the cultural narrative of progress-through-technology through this body of work.
“We are seduced by technology on a daily basis, by the perfect future it promises,” he writes. “This perfect future never materializes, it is always one innovation away, no matter how much we believe in it.” The works in this exhibition, he argues, serve as a critique of technological and philosophical hubris.
Elements of technology recur throughout the exhibition: nuclear warheads, the texture of plastic packaging and digital glitching, spherical abstractions. Vickerd creates narrative tension by juxtaposing these visual markers of technology, familiar animal forms, and monumental materials.
Many of the works feature nonhuman animals: a domestic cat, a fox, a rabbit, a bear, etc. While the choice of animal is based on the precise inciting idea for each artwork (e.g. the cat on the warhead was inspired by an archival photograph, the fox by an encounter on the side of the road), their collective presence enables the viewer to direct his empathy to a subject beyond himself. Suspended in states of vulnerable passivity, somewhere between slumber and death, these creatures remain beyond human comprehension and yet are subject, in their own way, to the myth of progress.
Bronze, iron, steel, and stone each call upon distinct histories, connotations, and constellations of meaning. “I am interested in material as a language,” Vickerd explains, “how bronze has a different energy and vitality than steel, and how steel resonates differently than stone.”
Bronze invokes monumentality; by rendering the animals in this material, the artist invests them with the stately authority of timelessness, suggesting a re-evaluation of their importance vis-à-vis technology.
One artwork in particular, titled Turkey Hammer, illustrates the role of serendipity in Vickerd’s process. One day in his studio, the artist was hammering steel and needed a particular shape of hammer. Having recently modelled a turkey for a public art project, Vickerd found his hammer in the test bronze casting of the turkey head which happened to be sitting on his workbench.
“It was a small mistake that led to a meditation on our bodies’ relationship to devices of building and destruction,” the artist explains. “The hammer is both a tool and an object that presents a potential for damage. I am still unclear as to the meaning of the object, but I appreciate that it is a weirdly surrealist juxtaposition. It is exceedingly fun to hold.”
A sculptor’s wit, tenderness, and a profoundly felt unease with the myth of progress come together in Brandon Vickerd’s Phantom Limb.
