JANUARY 20TH – FEBRUARY 24TH

AUSTEN BRANTLEY

MUSÉ

a solo exhibition

ARTIST STATEMENT
I often sculpt women in clay that I wish were in my everyday life. Those that might inspire me and steal me away from mundane experiences. 

My pieces become a metaphor for sirens that assist my escape from modern reality, into a world with endless possibilities and fantastical dreamscapes.

My new series of work rebels and accentuates these nymph fantasies with sculptures of women seducing and inducing the viewer’s own personal escape.

Austen Brantley is a Detroit artist who makes sculptures and installations. With Plato’s allegory of the cave in mind, Brantley creates work through labor-intensive processes which can be seen explicitly as a personal exorcism ritual. They are inspired by a nineteenth-century tradition of works, in which an ideal of ‘Fulfilled Absence’ was seen as the pinnacle.

His sculptures are based on formal associations which open a unique poetic vein. Multilayered images arise in which the fragility and instability of our seemingly certain reality is questioned. By choosing mainly formal solutions, he tries to develop forms that do not follow logical criteria, but are based only on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make new personal associations.

Musé, will be on exhibition in the Carr Center Gallery January 20 through February 25, 2022.

The Carr Center Gallery
15 E. Kirby Street, Detroit
Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday:: NOON  to 5 pm
Friday: NOON to 8pm