Brian Goggin chaos-provoking sculptures

Through a versatile use of materials, an intuitively driven research process, and creative visioning, I work to create artwork that poetically morphs expected notions of how we perceive and interact with our everyday environment. The work explores contemporary discoveries in the field of consciousness, and adds to a developing artistic mythology.  My work grows out of the context of site-specific sculpture installation, the environment, world vernacular architecture, literature, science  and philosophy.  I manifest the artwork in a process that often involves teams of people including those outside of the studio, museum and gallery spaces including for example collaborations with city planners, philosophers, scientists and architects. The resulting pieces develop an identity and attain an often previously unimagined history, and wondrously nestle into the site, offering the opportunity for aesthetic arrest....

Brian Goggin, an artist of infinite sculptural jest, has left his mark on the West Coast with his whimsical and vibrant layering of found objects and chaos-provoking sculptures. Goggin is a multi disciplinary artist who has created an interaction with the landscape that surpasses the physical limitations of traditional framed painting and free standing sculpture. Goggin has been creating sculpture, public artwork, and museum and gallery installations utilizing non-traditional locations and varied materials. He first attracted national attention in 1997 with Defenestration —an NEA funded site-specific sculptural mural on a dilapidated building in San Francisco. “Defenestration”, with its grandfather clock, tables, chairs and couches suspended in flight from the building’s windows, has become an unofficial San Francisco landmark.
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In November of 2008 he unveiled “Language of the Birds.” This piece is a sculpted, illuminated flock of twenty-three translucent, suspended open books with bindings positioned to simulate the wings of birds in flight. Attached to light poles by thin stainless steel cables, these books appear to be flying above the plaza. At night the books act as fluctuating lanterns light up by internal solar powered LED lights. Words, taken from books by neighborhood authors or written about the surrounding communities, will be scattered and embedded in the plaza as if the words have fallen from the pages. Goggin most recently created “Speechless” for the Lafayette Public library in Lafayette, California, among others he has created “Labyrinth” for the Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale California, “Samson” for the Sacramento International Airport, “Traffic of Ideas” for the Seattle Arts Commission, and “Herd Morality” for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

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works.....

Goggin studied Literature, and Fine Art at Cambridge University in England, and San Francisco State University

Defenestration

(Site-specific installation on the corner of 6th and Howard St. in San Francisco)

This multi-disciplinary sculptural mural involves seemingly animated furniture; tables, chairs, lamps, grandfather clocks, a refrigerator, and couches, their bodies bent like centipedes, fastened to the walls and window-sills, their insect-like legs seeming to grasp the surfaces. Against society’s expectations, these everyday objects flood out of windows like escapees, out onto available ledges, up and down the walls, onto the fire escapes and off the roof. “DEFENESTRATION” was created by Brian Goggin with the help of over 100 volunteers.

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The concept of “DEFENESTRATION”, a word literally meaning “to throw out of a window,” is embodied by both the site and staging of this installation. Located at the corner of Sixth and Howard Streets in San Francisco in an abandoned four-story tenement building, the site is part of a neighborhood that historically has faced economic challenges and has often endured the stigma of skid row status. Reflecting the harsh experience of many members of the community, the furniture is of the streets, cast-off and unappreciated. The simple, unpretentious beauty and humanity of these downtrodden objects is reawakened through the action of the piece. The act of “throwing out” becomes an uplifting gesture of release, inviting reflection on the spirit of the people we live with, the objects we encounter, and the places in which we live.

The ground level has served as a rotating gallery for the vibrant artwork of street muralists.

Photogenesis

(Permanent site-specific sculpture for North SeaTac Park, King County WA)

Three lamppost trees sprout and stand tall, their filaments like night flowers glow, pulsing at different rates and in multiple colors. The trunks appear to be covered in a rusty bark. This unexpected artistic medium cultivates a non-sequitur juxtaposition between icon and material.

Once a virgin forest, later cut with native tribal trade routes, the area developed further when a military roadway provided access to the land for farming. Eventually, residential housing replaced the rural area only to be commuted by the needs of the airport. Ironically, the land is again devoid of houses. Beneath the surface of the earth lies a seed pod for future archaeologists to harvest a field of understanding into 20th century suburban residential living. Out of this soil emerges iconic representations of the past,. These resilient ancestors need not represent a threat. They reflect a source of accidental beauty, a garden of unexpected and partly un-designed delights. A juxtaposition of the mineral and vegetable worlds, this artwork alludes to a potential fusion of nature with technology.

Language of the Birds

(A site-specific sculptural installation for the public plaza on the corner of Broadway, Grant and Columbus Streets, San Francisco)

Historically “The Language of the Birds” was considered a divine language birds used to communicate with the initiated. Here, a flock of books takes off from the plaza to fly the urban gullies of the city. The fluttering books have left a gentle imprint of words beneath them. These serendipitously configured bits of local literature reveal the layering of culture, nature and consciousness.

Language of the Birds is a flock of twenty-three sculpted illuminated books, which appear to have just taken flight from the plaza like pigeons scared up by a passer by. Appearing to be in motion, the books have flown open creating various wing positions with the pages and bindings. The entire artwork appears to be in motion with each book holding its position as a bird does in a flock.

Each unique book is fabricated in frosted white translucent polycarbonate. These sculptural elements are suspended from a geometric web of stainless steel aircraft cables. At night LED lights embedded in the books create visual patterns, at different times one might see the flock subtly pulsing or displaying a spectacular zoetropic effect. The dynamic lights of Language of the Birds play in the night sky with the other luminous signs of the area.
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Passing under the flock, pedestrians notice words and phrases embedded in the plaza floor that appear to have fallen from the pages. On closer inspection the fallen words are in English, Italian and Chinese and were selected from the neighborhood’s rich literary history, ranging from the Beats, to SF Renaissance poets and Chinese writers, over 90 authors are represented including Armistead Maupin, Gary Snyder,William T. Vollman, and Jade Snow Wong.

The artists created the design of the plaza floor in Atrium of the SFMOMA. Retaining their original font, individual words from chosen phrases were cast from the third floor gallery of the museum. Words fluttered down 60 feet landing on a paper replica of the plaza thus determining their resting place in the final artwork. Influenced by practices like reading tea-leaves and Japanese gardening techniques. The words intersect in ways that allow for new unique interpretations and meanings.

Goggin conceptualized of the piece during a residency at the Djerassi foundation. “I sat with my understanding of the site, while watching swallows move through the air, they came together to create fleeting compositions. The image of flying books emerged from the idea of culture and nature interconnecting in unexpected ways.” Influenced by the literary genre magic realism, his sculptures bring new life, movement and meaning to familiar objects .

Historically “the language of the birds” is referred to in mythology, medieval literature, and occult texts as a mystical, ideal or divine language, or a mythical or magical language used by birds to communicate with the initiated. In Kaballah, Renaissance magic, and alchemy, the language of the birds was considered a secret key to perfect knowledge.

Goggin and Keehn teamed up with scientist David Shearer and Lawrence Ferlengetti’s City lights bookstore to power Language of the Birds with solar panels mounted on top of the iconic bookstore. It is the first permanent solar-powered public art piece in the United States.

Herd Instinct

(Site-specific installation for Emerytech, 1400 65th St. Emeryville, CA USA)

Twelve bronze tables: pieces of furniture to be used to eat from, to read at, leave stains and books on, to meet around, associated generally with the domestic homestead. The tables have turned. Escaped, they run together, nomads, like a herd of wild buffalo roaming across the urban plains, they spill in waves off the sides of the building, jumping from one roof to another, down to and across the courtyard below. The artwork alludes to the fundamental uncontrollability of nature in an urban setting: how people, objects and environment, regardless of construct and status inevitably and intrinsically are tied to the mysterious, chaotic, and organic. Here barriers drop between people and things, objects and intentions.

Metaphorm

An appreciation for the crafts of both the instrument builder and boat builder will be embodied in “METAPHORM”, a thirty-foot sea-worthy acoustic instrument which will be constructed in the style of a traditional lute. A wooden lapstrake boat thirty feet in length, will serve as the rounded base, a decking as the sound board. The rosette, bridge, neck and head stock will be crafted in wood, scaled, in proportion with the boat. The craft will be piloted by a captain-cum-musician, as it is being played, floating in the various wave conditions, combining the gentle lapping of the waves against the hull with the resonating strings.

“METAPHORM” will poetically combine visually and conceptually related imagery with reference to music and the environment. Music and water are bound together by their temporal nature; tides, the waves’ repetition and rhythm. Emotions and memories evoked by music and water will generate resonances, drawing the viewer into a period of speculation, an internal labyrinth of their own, involving them in the act of creation.

Body of Urban Myth

(Permanent site-specific sculpture for Sheridan Plaza in the City of Palo Alto)

“BODY OF URBAN MYTH” is comprised of a Hellenistic female figure hoisting a cast bronze washing machine heroically overhead, a cascade of water pours from the open door of the machine into the fountain below. The bronze sculpture is in an ongoing dialogue with its companions: two replicas of classical Greek male warrior sculptures (attributed to Phidias) bearing spears and shields; who stand watch in the plaza.

The work is inspired by memory and the way in which we create and unwittingly revise notions of the past. Through imagination, dreams and memory, we replace or fill in for, unknown or forgotten events, experiences, characters and objects, with anachronisms.
Dimensions: 12 ½ feet tall

Speechless

(A permanent site-specific sculpture for the Lafayette Library, Lafayette, California)

A giant wavering bronze stack of paper rises. Had one taken a page from every book in the library collection, stacking one on top of the other, a stack of paper equivalent in height to this sculpture would result. The towering sculpture winds and teeters reaching precarious proportions. Wind has caught the top pages blowing them across the outdoor plaza, up and through the stairway corridor.

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Some pages furl in mid air, flying above the walkways while others wrap around trellis posts, past the library walls. Each fluttering page is etched with layers of text and graphics relating to all pages ever printed. The etched pages use as their pallet imagery scanned directly from books drawing from all sections of a library’s book collection. The information is freed from its traditional limits on a page to rise through the stack and out into the individual sheets as water moves through a channel mixing churning, pouring an dispersing. The pages waft through the walkways. The metamorphosis of how we learn is captured by the dynamic, dreamlike flight of the bronze pages wafting gracefully through the air.

LABYRINTH

(Permanent site-specific sculptural installation for Yahoo!, Sunnyvale, California)

“LABYRINTH” is a site-specific sculptural installation of five portals, arranged on the Yahoo! Headquarters public park, as a web without path or boundary. The portals are full-sized, seemingly random open doors attached to their door frames, each standing in a different part of the grassy, forested landscape. Each of the doors are cast in bronze from actual antiquated doors chosen from five unique cultures throughout the world. Their individual cultural identity is clearly evident in their shape, composition, ornament and symbolic representation. Each visitor may follow a unique personal labyrinth as they meander along their chosen path, passing through and metaphorically connecting the virtual cultures represented by each of the ancient doorways.

The placement of the doors uses the surrounding environment as an intrinsic part of the sculpture. The interactions between portals, people and landscape in the context of the Yahoo! campus forms the core of the artwork.

For both the public and Yahoo! employees, this sculptural installation offers many layers of interpretation. It can be seen as open doors between the intuitive and the rational, alluding to the connection between the artistic and the scientific. At another level, it suggests a point of passage or transition to new realms. Walking through the doors might allude to a metaphorical journey, perhaps through the doors of knowledge to hidden truths or into mystical domains. For others working in the Yahoo! headquarters, the path may well represent one of discovery of a new perspective or a process of exploration, looking for an answer to a problem or question. Like the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral, the doors become an environmental mandalla for meditation, vision and adventure.

At a larger level, the sculptural environment can be seen as a metaphor for the boundlessly deep and globally diverse World Wide Web itself. The ancient and unique doors might allude to the multitude of web sites offering instantaneous passage to cultures from all corners of the globe. The act of physically walking between doors across the open landscape suggests the movement of a web traveler, seamlessly linking from site to site and culture to culture across the virtual landscape of the Internet.

Desire for the Other

This project was sculpted by Brian Goggin with Al Honig and Tom Kennedy. It is part of the San Jose Museum of Art permanent collection.

It’s a pandemoniacal moment, bounding off the floor, an amiable enough, elongated, many legged, yet crapulous couch wraps its craning ends bulbous pillows around an under stuffed rather intellectual reading chair. Not for osculation, but for silencing consumption. An armor of orange upholstery stretches tight, seams strained, over previously pillow-gummed furniture, constrained inside the padded peptic tract but not yet dissolved, a table, a television, a lamp, and a telephone, thrust their extremities out, unlikely tent poles making fabric braille, caught in the couches duodenum. Black belly arching, red legs clambering, it peers your way.

Convertibles

This project was sculpted by Brian Goggin and Michael Eckerman.

It is a permanent site specific installation in Menlo Park.

Remnants of a residential neighborhood grow from the scattered seeds of suburban iconography. Stones conglomerate to form couches, with apparent yearning and consciousness. They wind their way out of the earth, squirming over and lifting up one another as they aspire up beyond the confines of the rubble beneath.

Like the site itself, once blanketed with farmland, later home to working class residents and now an active, professional suburban neighborhood, “CONVERTIBLES” physically and metaphorically embodies the essence of transition. The sculpture juxtaposes and recontextulizes iconic imagery from the area’s agrarian and residential culture, suggesting a continuum of change. Apparently formed from the rock underground, the furniture is apparently transformed into conscious, living entities which can be seen at the moment they emerge from beneath the earth’s surface in the enigmatic manner of sprouting crops. As with crops the soil around the sculpture is upset as if the couches are thrusting through the earth’s skin, clinging to the edges of the objects.