Gabe Strader-Brown, originally from Burlington, Vermont, graduated from Beloit College in 2007 where he studied studio art and anthropology. Between 2007 and 2012, he worked for various art organizations including The Soap Factory and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and RARE Gallery in New York City. In 2008 he co-curated the Soap Factory's volunteer biennial Minimal/Manimal. He has exhibited and participated in exhibitions and events at venues such as The Soap Factory, The Art Shanty Projects and the Duluth Art Center in Minnesota, the Wright Art Museum in Beloit, Wisconsin and MANA Contemporary in Chicago, Illinois and Jersey City, NJ. Strader-Brown received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2015, and continues to exhibit in Madison's art venues. In 2015 he attended Anderson Ranch Art Center's artist residency program in Snow Mass Village, CO, and was awarded International Sculpture Center's Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award in which he exhibited work at Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ. He is currently participating in the group exhibition Wake the Town and Tell the People at MANA Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ, which will run from April to September of 2016. In addition Strader-Brown will be attending the Vermont Studio Center artist residency in January of 2017. He continues to create sculpture through formal appropriation and material mimicry and constantly looks to the ubiquitous items in our lives that we recognize on a regular basis.
Gabriel Strader-Brown
Statement
My sculptural works reference generic and vernacular forms, design, and imagery that are recognized in different urban settings. These sculptures, which range from being constructed from a variety of materials and mediums are objects or images whose abundance and lasting presence make them memorable and learned. I see these objects as inexplicably ingrained in our minds, and I try to assess why they are so familiar by analyzing the shapes and forms of the subject matter. These sculptures both appropriate existing design through material substation and abstraction. I am also drawn to the reasoning behind objects' and architecture's conception and construction. They have intentional design qualities that only get partial recognition due to their application to functions of necessity and utility. Their originating aesthetics entwine function with decorative sentimentality directed at particular societies. The objects and images serve as representations of visual culture and movements of design that directly reference ideological goals. My objective is to explore facets of my urban culture by continuing to reconstruct urban and domestic archetypes and recycling them these designs for sculptural purposes. Similar to my interest in objects and forms of commonality, materials common to architecture and craft are important to my practice. I've practice methods of re-using banal materials that translate to themes of phenomenology and natural re-constitution. My goal for the future is to push materials to extremely new capabilities while referencing our relationship with commonality and what it means to us.
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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.
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