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Image Not Available for BRIAN CHRISTENSEN
BRIAN CHRISTENSEN
Image Not Available for BRIAN CHRISTENSEN

BRIAN CHRISTENSEN

born 1963
BiographyOf San Diego, California, and now Springville, Utah, is a talented ceramic sculptor who studied at Brigham Young University (B.F.A., 1990) and Washington University in St. Louis (M.F.A., ceramics, 1992). Christensen's work has been represented by Componere Gallery of Art in St. Louis in recent years; from 1992 to 1995 the artist won first and third prizes in a University City Art Guild showing in California, as well as "jurors awards" at the Springville Museum of Art (1994) and the Holter Museum of Art in Helena, Montana (1995). Most recently, his art appeared in the prestigious Utah Arts Council show, "A View of Seven," at the Salt Lake Art Center (1996). Gordon McConnell, juror at the exhibition, wrote the following: "Brian Christensen, a sculptor who works primarily with ceramics, bases his work in a process-oriented, 'truth to materials' aesthetic. He contextualizes his Arc series in geology, depicting the surface of a land strewn with the horns of bison and pronghorns and large-bore shell casings, and a section of the underlying strata crowded with root-like forms, fossils and inscriptions. These are dissected landscapes, laden like the earth itself with buried meanings."

Olpin, Robert S., William C. Seifrit, and Vern G. Swanson. ARTISTS OF UTAH. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 1999: 52.

Brian Christensen was born 16 September 1963 in San Diego, California. He received his BFA from Brigham Young University and his MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Brian has been a Visual Arts faculty member teaching sculpture and ceramics since 1993.

Cycles of birth, growth, decline, and entropy are inherent not only to all life but to all matter as we know it. I am interested in the cyclical nature of existence and particularly those stages in the cycle of an object, organism, or creation which evidences change and tells a story. In my work, these stories are told through the metaphorical relationships between forms. The way things come together and fall apart and the continual flux of time, motion, cause and effect are referenced in what I think of as sculptural allegories. Bending, torqueing, melting, mounding, hanging, dividing, falling, resting: the tectonic vocabulary of sculpture mimics the tendencies of life and earth.
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