Photo by Tedd Henn
elements of formalism instead of high conceptualism in a lot of my projects. I’ve found it tough to create a narrative that would interest a lot of museums. So I’ve had more luck at showing my work at the National Academy of Sciences and obviously the Baltimore Museum of Industry—places where there’s a little more meat to the subtext of the work as well as the look and aesthetic of the work. BB: Are there any artists, in any medium, who you’ve drawn inspiration from for your own work? CB: I can’t say that there’s anyone that I aspire to be like. I’ve always been drawn to art that exhibits a couple of things: some sort of mastery, a sincerity, a playfulness. I like artists who take the work seriously, but not themselves seriously. Artists have different periods; if you look at artists over the course of a career, for artists who become successful, seriousness usually creeps in eventually. I’m a sculptor who’s learned machine work and turned that into my medium. As an artist machinist, it gets kind of lonely when you don’t have a lot of peers. So I’ve been looking for other machinists, and what I’ve found is a lot of craftspeople and communities— people who make knives, people who modify firearms, people who make things that the art world sometimes is a little bit snobby about. At first I was hesitant to explore those avenues, but you can’t take yourself too seriously;
FEBRUARY 21, 2018
Photo by Tedd Henn
there’s a lot of beauty in what these communities are making. I’ve had a lot of meaningful interactions with people in the maker community. BB: In some ways, your object names remind me of Autechre song titles, which typically seem to resemble experimental pharmaceuticals— they’re assemblages of letters and numbers which force the listener to deal with the music on its own terms. Why do you give your works names like “NV 614434235524”? CB: I’m very intentional about not giving any of my objects fictional functions or narratives, because I don’t want them to be science-fiction objects—I want them to be art objects. I don’t even give them recognizable titles. They’re “properly” titled when I start, but then there’s an encryption cipher that I use so that [the ultimate names are] just garbled nonsense. Like I said, your experience of the work is based on your worldview— your frame of reference. Everyone comes at the work from a different angle. I get a lot out of people’s reactions to the work; I find it interesting, and it gives me ideas sometimes. BB: How did you come to machine artwork? How did it begin for you? CB: The bulk of my art education was in high school. When I graduated from high school, the thing I was most interested in was sculpture—I had already started experimenting with it, playing around
with some rudimentary welding. I was working in metals and had a lot of ideas of what I wanted to pursue, and this was pre-Makerspace, pre-Internet, pre-easy access to fabrication knowledge. So I got it into my head that I needed to go to arts college, to learn technical skills like fabrication and how to work with tools and metal. So I applied to Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and I went there for one year, and my experience was not one of learning technical skills; it was very “art theory” heavy. BB: Were you looking for something more active? CB: I was looking for tangible skills. A lot of people go to art school to find themselves, and learn what they want to make; I already had a pretty robust idea of the things that I wanted to pursue. Instead, I was in these theory classes, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the opportunity to make the things I wanted to make—and not learning the things I thought I needed to learn: how to put things together, how to build structures that don’t fall apart. So after a year I was frustrated and a little broke, so I dropped out of art school. There was a little self-reflection after that, asking myself “what is it that I need to really pursue what I’m interested in?” It kept coming back to technical knowledge. So I became obsessed with learning little facets of every technical trade. I started off with welding, then I did some woodwork, then I picked up some
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rudimentary fabrication and sheet metal tools. Then I sort of stumbled onto machining; I’d found this craft that was different than all the other crafts I’d done. Machine work is this very holistic craft; you can build with machine tools machines to do all of the other trades I’d been exploring, right? You can build woodworking tools. You can build sheet metal tools. You can build other machining tools to work differently. You can make paint brushes to paint. You can make anything. You can make a car. I was looking for the primary color of working in three-dimensional shapes. BB: At this point, is metal art what you do for a living? CB: Uh-huh. BB: How long have you been able to sustain that, if you’re comfortable saying? CB: I think it’s been since about 2012. At first I was working a day job, then I’d do about a 30-hour week in the studio—I was doing that for about 11 years. But now I’m self-supporting; I sell enough work now that I can make it work. BB: Has this been all you’d hoped it would be? CB: I guess it’s scary at first, until you get used to the uncertainty of not having a regular paycheck. There’s a lot more pressure not just to produce, but to produce good work. When I quit my day job, I’d saved up just enough money to
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