Gallery
(Click the images to enlarge and scroll)
Gold Star Days, 2023
Concrete, hauling chain, floor decal, tin silicone, and biological samples are in solution in plastic bottles. 96”T x 59”W
Stone Henge 2.5 (No Work in the Grave), 2023
Paper, concrete urethane rubber. 48”W x32”T
Star Eyes, 2023
concrete, hauling chain, track spikes, magnets, steel plate, found image. 32”T x 16”W x 5”D
Of the World, 2023
concrete, hauling chain, track spikes, magnets, urethane rubber, found image. 32”T x 16”W x 10”D
A Fool Eats the Light, 2023,
Concrete, galvanized pole, steel chain, urethane rubber, track spikes, floor decals, rubber chicken, bonding primer, plastidip, all thread, aqua resin and foam coat and hydro graphics.
Morning Star, 2023
Wood panel, floor decals, jack chain, urethane rubber, steel, concrete, hydro graphics, all-thread and aqua-resin. Approximately 223”W x 95”T
Mr. Smiley and Math is a Tempestuous Lover, 2022
Upholstery Foam, silicone, stick, and poke tattoo, synthetic hair. 11”T x 11”W x 8”D
Cascade (Grimace Masks), 2021
polyester resin, aqua-Resin, body filler, polyurethane foam, gypsum powder, concrete adhesive, gelcoat, fiberglass, and acrylic paint, Variable dimensions (Requires false wall)
Pantagruel & Pantagruel, 2022
Silicone, microcontrollers, linear actuator, safety blankets, conduit, plastidip, animated led lights, mouse trap, epoxy, urethane rubber and latex tubes.
92”T x 90”W x 36D
Pissing Fountain, 2021
Fountain, wall and indeterminable liquid, (installed 58” off ground.) Variable Dimensions (requires false wall)
Fabullus, 2021
artificial box fern, aqua-resin and found garments.
52”T x 32”W x 49”D
Future Promises, 2022
airline seat, aqua resin, flex seal, plyester resin casts, gypsum casts, found objects, safety chain, plastidip, epoxy, metal frame, duct tape, and found image.
52”T x 41”W x 32”D
Plug Roast, 2022
Insulation foam, body filler, aqua resin, fiber glass, plastilina, fire pit.
Variable Dimensions
Belly Graffiti ( 1, 2, 3 ) , 2022
Silicone, Sumi Ink, Stick’n’poke tattoo, synthetic hair
8”T x 8”W
Cotton Mouth, 2022
Rabbit fur, silicon, electrical solder, safety chain, zinc chain, PVC paint, Polyester resin, body filler, and fiberglass. 18”T x 8”W x 3”D
Kissing Rocket, 2022
Silicone, electrical solder, fo und image, vinyl, brass grommets, zinc chain, polyester resin, fiberglass, and body filler 13”T x 8”W x 3”D
Biography
Statement
Biography
Anthony Rundblade works and lives in San Antonio, TX. Rundblade works in sculpture, installation, and print. He earned his BFA with a focus in printmaking from The University of Texas at San Antonio and his MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Texas - Austin. Before entering his MFA candidacy, Rundblade worked as a Studio Technician and Studio Manager at the Artpace Residency Program (2014-2019). Rundblade’s solo exhibitions include Cloak Dagger Parallel Meridians (2017), Catastrophe Parade (2018), Nearer Midnight (2019), and Cascade (2022). Collaborative and group exhibitions include Bush League (2018), Doom & Bloom (2022) & Wild Ruins Wild Orientations (2023).
Statement
My artwork will change, as it should, for the better or worse. This statement will change with it. But for now, I will give you some honest thoughts and lay a groundwork for you to consider when you feel inclined to search for a purpose in this work, saving that you get beyond the nihilistic haze surrounding it. However, should you find it within yourself to hold back from reading any further, you could find the potential to be rewarded with an unadulterated view unique to your genuine thoughts and emotion. To have you not continue reading would be best here, as what I am creating requires a less cerebral understanding from an audience and a more innate and essential communion between object and image and audience. And I'll do both of us a favor. I'll give you a short version and leave it up to you to fill in the gaps for yourself, and I'll offer a lengthy, convoluted statement that might be worth your time, but who knows if it will satiate you or satisfy your burning desire for clarity.
The Short Version
The Longer Version
My work derives from the principles of the Grotesque. I use these principles to think about the era in which I live, as I believe the concept of the Grotesque might be a path to an understanding of this era on an innate plane and a way to commune with our essential humanity. However, before I write on these principles, I think it's good to understand some background on the concept, which will become slightly opaque and almost auxiliary. Still, this fundamental background will help build a contrast between the Grotesque as an unstable and ever-changing thing and the unchanging principles that allow us to give some loose definition to the concept of the Grotesque.
What the Grotesque is is difficult to say. It's kind of like pornography, in that one knows it when one sees it, but what one deems to be pornographic will hinge on cultural temperatures and personal backgrounds. The Grotesque is similar. One knows the Grotesque when encountering it, even without knowing the principles that drive the concept. Though, when presented as a noun, the Grotesque is nearly indefinable. Of course, things are often described as grotesque, scenes of life, images, and behaviors, but what is interesting about the instability of the Grotesque is where that Grotesque goes. Rather than disappearing, it falls into the fabric of the banality of a new era. What was grotesque yesterday is part of the banal fabric of today, and the same applies to the Grotesque of today, as each age, generation and culture will develop their respective categorization of the Grotesque. I like to think of the discovery of the Domas Aurea as a derivation of the Grotesque. Consider that the site's discovery was accidental and relatively dumb, literally found by a man that fell into a hole while walking in a field. Its resulting discovery and excavation almost released the concept of the Grotesque like a plume of dust from a subterranean grotto that would come to settle over the earth's surface. An analog for this might be the effect of the 1945 Trinity Tests and the resulting contamination of steel. These tests and their material impact on steel production effectively mark a distinction between the pre and post-nuclear age, an age that undermined previous definitions of essential humanity before 1945.
So far, I have been more or less successfully thinking about the function of a concept. To narrow down this function of the Grotesque for myself, I use the illustration of the life cycle of a campfire. First, we can imagine ourselves in front of a campfire, one that we willed into existence briefly before the sun fell. In front of our campfire, we can see and define the space and objects surrounding us. We can trace their edges and judge their distance. The stones that surround our very stereotypical campfire are warm. We can feel them as they draw energy from the fire. We can see ourselves. We can see the hands that built a fire, made sense of tinder, collected dry grasses and sticks, and patiently worked to draw a spark from flint, nurturing that spark into something reasonable. Beyond ourselves, we can see the light from our fire catch objects, maybe trees in the distance or a bit of the clearing that has become our station, but beyond that is a vast and dark space of indeterminable possibility.
Our reality is what we see and know in the halo of light cast by our fire. In this light, we can establish a fixed definition of our humanity. Yet, there is less and less definition in the rings moving outward from the fire. These rings of varying intensity increasingly become incapable of definition, allowing objects to take on more impossible forms. As the night progresses, the veil draws closer as our fire gets smaller. As a result, less of our reality is understood and visible. Eventually, we sleep, our fire dies, and the veil consumes us. But in the morning, our reality is expansive and precise, and we can see everything. The veil that housed unrealities and impossibilities and exploited our imagination is seemingly gone. Instead, the dark veil housing our grotesqueries is brought into the banality of a new day by way of the charred material within our fire pit.
The natural progression of the Grotesque is the shifting of looming fears or potential distortions of collective, or even individual, understandings of humanity from behind that dark veil and into our exposed banality. The grotesque is an operation of waves in a persistent rhythm, always moving in from the margins. Yesterday's fears and tensions that will come to challenge and undermine an understanding of humanity eventually become part of the next day's banal definition.
I derive images, sculptures, and installations through this framework. I am making work while thinking about the residue of yesterday's Grotesque and the cultivation of tomorrow's strange and gnarled banality developed by things creeping in from the margins.
The Short Version
- There exists the concept of the Grotesque.
- The Grotesque is that which subverts, inverts, undermines, or threatens that which is familiar and reinforces our perception of the definition of our essential humanity through attraction and repulsion.
- The Grotesque principles are constant, though that which is considered Grotesque shifts and changes from era to era, culture to culture, down to the granular perceptions of an individual.
- To ascend to the Grotesque requires an audience to experience laughter, astonishment, and disgust/horror. Garnering these responses connects to innate and involuntary aspects of our humanity.
- Of the themes of the Grotesque, the Carnivalesque and writings of Mikhail Bhaktin provide a precedent for Joyous Anarchy, inversions of social hierarchy and bodily order, laughter, satire, abundance, and profanity.
- Themes found in the Grotesque include comedy, body horror, apocalypse, the unconscious, nightmare, plague, the uncanny, or that which causes estrangement from the rational and familiar.
- Examples of social Grotesque that more or less have become part of the background and banality of our every day are global warming (climate change), urbanization, automation, and technological advances.
- I wonder if it is applicable to say our era is the Grotesque Era. Not because our world is full of horrors but because we exist in a time in which the rapacious speed where the definitions and understanding of essential humanity are redefined and challenged by a relationship to technology, media, and looming catastrophe.
- As an artist, I want to build a relationship with the Grotesque, affirming a connection to our innate and essential humanity through sculpture, print, and installation.
The Longer Version
My work derives from the principles of the Grotesque. I use these principles to think about the era in which I live, as I believe the concept of the Grotesque might be a path to an understanding of this era on an innate plane and a way to commune with our essential humanity. However, before I write on these principles, I think it's good to understand some background on the concept, which will become slightly opaque and almost auxiliary. Still, this fundamental background will help build a contrast between the Grotesque as an unstable and ever-changing thing and the unchanging principles that allow us to give some loose definition to the concept of the Grotesque.
What the Grotesque is is difficult to say. It's kind of like pornography, in that one knows it when one sees it, but what one deems to be pornographic will hinge on cultural temperatures and personal backgrounds. The Grotesque is similar. One knows the Grotesque when encountering it, even without knowing the principles that drive the concept. Though, when presented as a noun, the Grotesque is nearly indefinable. Of course, things are often described as grotesque, scenes of life, images, and behaviors, but what is interesting about the instability of the Grotesque is where that Grotesque goes. Rather than disappearing, it falls into the fabric of the banality of a new era. What was grotesque yesterday is part of the banal fabric of today, and the same applies to the Grotesque of today, as each age, generation and culture will develop their respective categorization of the Grotesque. I like to think of the discovery of the Domas Aurea as a derivation of the Grotesque. Consider that the site's discovery was accidental and relatively dumb, literally found by a man that fell into a hole while walking in a field. Its resulting discovery and excavation almost released the concept of the Grotesque like a plume of dust from a subterranean grotto that would come to settle over the earth's surface. An analog for this might be the effect of the 1945 Trinity Tests and the resulting contamination of steel. These tests and their material impact on steel production effectively mark a distinction between the pre and post-nuclear age, an age that undermined previous definitions of essential humanity before 1945.
So far, I have been more or less successfully thinking about the function of a concept. To narrow down this function of the Grotesque for myself, I use the illustration of the life cycle of a campfire. First, we can imagine ourselves in front of a campfire, one that we willed into existence briefly before the sun fell. In front of our campfire, we can see and define the space and objects surrounding us. We can trace their edges and judge their distance. The stones that surround our very stereotypical campfire are warm. We can feel them as they draw energy from the fire. We can see ourselves. We can see the hands that built a fire, made sense of tinder, collected dry grasses and sticks, and patiently worked to draw a spark from flint, nurturing that spark into something reasonable. Beyond ourselves, we can see the light from our fire catch objects, maybe trees in the distance or a bit of the clearing that has become our station, but beyond that is a vast and dark space of indeterminable possibility.
Our reality is what we see and know in the halo of light cast by our fire. In this light, we can establish a fixed definition of our humanity. Yet, there is less and less definition in the rings moving outward from the fire. These rings of varying intensity increasingly become incapable of definition, allowing objects to take on more impossible forms. As the night progresses, the veil draws closer as our fire gets smaller. As a result, less of our reality is understood and visible. Eventually, we sleep, our fire dies, and the veil consumes us. But in the morning, our reality is expansive and precise, and we can see everything. The veil that housed unrealities and impossibilities and exploited our imagination is seemingly gone. Instead, the dark veil housing our grotesqueries is brought into the banality of a new day by way of the charred material within our fire pit.
The natural progression of the Grotesque is the shifting of looming fears or potential distortions of collective, or even individual, understandings of humanity from behind that dark veil and into our exposed banality. The grotesque is an operation of waves in a persistent rhythm, always moving in from the margins. Yesterday's fears and tensions that will come to challenge and undermine an understanding of humanity eventually become part of the next day's banal definition.
I derive images, sculptures, and installations through this framework. I am making work while thinking about the residue of yesterday's Grotesque and the cultivation of tomorrow's strange and gnarled banality developed by things creeping in from the margins.
CV
Anthony Rundblade
Email: AnthonyRundblade@gmail.com
Education
2022 MFA, University of Texas Austin
2015 BFA, University of Texas at San Antonio
Group/Collaborative Exhibitions
2024 Tales in a Concrete Garden, Co-Lab Projects, Curated by Guadelaraja 90210, Austin, TX
2023 Nice Work 3, Sulk Chicago, Chicago, IL
2023 All of the Clock Have Been Wrong For Years, Mass Gallery, Austin, TX
2023 Wild Orientations Wild Ruins, Sculpture Park, Adkins, TX
2023 Never Change, Night Club Gallery, St. Paul, MN
2023 Picking at Scabs, Contemporary Art Month Perennial, San Antonio, TX
2022 Bag Lunch, Unsmoke Systems, Pittsburgh, PA
2022 Doom & Bloom, Co-Lab, Austin, TX
2022 Painted Hooves, Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX
2021 0 to 60, Presa House, San Antonio, TX
2020 Mirror Drama, Visual Arts Center, Austin, TX
2019 Bush League (Bux Toof Collective), Sweat Pass Sculpture Park, Dallas, TX
2018 60 on Center, Presa House, San Antonio, TX
2018 Common Currents, Southwest School of Art, San Antonio, TX
2017 Tree Decades Plus, UTSA 1604 Gallery, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, TX
2016 YLA 21 Amexican@ and Changarritto Project, Mexic-Arte Museum, Austin, TX
Solo Exhibitions
2022 Cascade, Night Club Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
2019 Nearer Midnight, Presa House, San Antonio, TX
2018 Catastrophe Parade, The Dirty Dark Place, Kyle, TX (as part of The Back Door Biennial)
2017 Cloak Dagger Parallel Meridians, Hello Studios, San Antonio, TX
Residencies
2018 Dirty Dark Place Residency, Kyle, TX
2017 Hello Studio Residency, San Antonio, TX
2016 Shepherd Print Studios, Boston, MA