Joseph Buckley

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

I return to Sculpture again and again for its validity. For its integrity, for its realness. We were taught, growing up, that materialism was a spiritual sickness, and yet today: again and again we are asked to embrace a way of living in which we will own nothing, will never own anything, and will rent all things forever: serfs on the cloud. I reject the binary that divides the tangible from the intangible, and believe that there is something divine about the matter of factness of sculpture. In the making of it, there exists a 1:1 relationship to labor (and its ownership) that inspires a sense of self respect. In the viewing of it, one encounters something uncompromisingly real: where all painting is imagistic, all sculpture by definition is genuinely real. The swirl of stars in a galactic arm, the froth of bubbles in a coffee cup, etc etc. These fractal patterns repeat themselves as structures because they are the most efficient ways for materials to sit together or for energy to be dispersed. I am interested in what might be understood as a fractal dynamics of violence, and of cruelty. In many respects I’m less interested in the specifics of actual and direct historical instances of racism or oppression, of historic and contemporary class and race politics, than I am in the dynamics and structures that repeat them endlessly throughout history in different contexts. In my work, I am not referring to some phantom future, nor to some deep past’s primordial truth, but...

Artwork