Of all things Steampunk, sculptures are some of the most imposing works of art. Brian Marshall has uploaded a number of pictures of all the Steampunk robot assemblage sculptures that he created for Brandywine Show last summer.
The show too place on the 10th and 11th of September, and I must say these metallic and bronze objects sure must have gained a lot of attention at the stalls. All the sculptures have something Victorian about them, and are strangely caught in the midst of a surreal industrial age and cyber punk age that are two opposite poles. In fact, much of Steampunk art tries to juxtapose industrial age aesthetics with that of cyber punk themes.
All of these sculptures are inspired by regular events, people and professions. For instance, there is a pirate, a basketball player, a hockey player, and other characters from imagined or fictitious scenarios, such as Cornell 2, Sinclair and Magnus.
These are characters that you may see in regular video games, and characters that are partly the result of an extremely volatile imagination. Nonetheless, they succeed in their attempts to juxtapose Victorian gloom and doom with cyber-age hope. If one were to worry about the effect of technology on our minds, this is probably one of the ways to represent that eternal worry.
While the steam engine caused horror among Victorians, technological feats like social networking sites cause horror among people associated with government, security agencies and even school administrators. Society at large has always desired a robotic society, and when art and technology question robotic and zombified thinking, there is an immediate refusal to change.
That change is clearly reflected in these robot sculptures that are caught in strange industrial era situation. You could also take a look at the Steampunk Horse, the Steampunk iPod Mod and Steampunk Teacher Mask, which are all inspired by industrial and Victorian era aesthetics.
