Paul Bagley
Artist Statement
I pursue the visual arts because of the wonderful and inspiring experiences it presents. This compels me to explore the value of art and how it (emotionally and figuratively) connects with the individual or society. Fundamentally I’m attempting to uncover the origins of art and how that reverberates in the contemporary art world. Remembrance, ritual, and paradox are common threads throughout much of my efforts.
Artist Bio
Aside from teaching, my professional activity and achievement as an artist has been applied art and design that started in 1990 when was hired into an art department after a career in Information Technology. Eventually I found time to make artwork outside of the daily design grind. In 2011, I collaborated with the Flaming Lotus Girls who specialized in industrial art to advance my qualifications for permanent public art. The sculpture was built in San Francisco for a site-specific event. I was lead fabricator for accurately calculating the rotating compounc truss components into their final composition for structural integrity. I currently share a desk at Slivr with Butzer Architects and Urbanism in Oklahoma City.
Notable influences include working with Architect and Artist Paolo Soleri continuing what he has bestowed, exposure to contemporary art while working in Chicago, adventures throughout pre-capitalist China, exploring my Irish Heritage as a first generation American, participating in Burning Man, and living within the extreme ecology of the American South West.
Artist Work
Title: Desert Monsoon
Category: Sculpture
Genre: Contemporary Art
Description: Abstract art that functions as a bird bath.
Title: Looking Glass Prairie
Category: Sculpture
Genre: Contemporary Art
Description: A monument to the last vestiges of the Santa Fe Trail still visible in a region once known as No-Mans-Land. It serves as a sanctuary that includes a sleeping deck/picnic table. With patience, binoculars or camera obscura, the chair becomes a lookout tower for antelope, raptors, coyotes, and the biggest show of all, nightfall.
Title: Distant Oceanic Memories
Category: Sculpture
Genre: Contemporary Art
Description: Distant Oceanic Memories is part of a series of abstract three-dimensional forms, some resembling fossil like shapes, others as objects that evoke curiosity or wonder and appear to serve an unknown purpose.
Location
73102