Chase Brandon
A scrapped-materials sculptor working from Northern Virginia who specializes in mechanically inspired works of art.
ChaseArt employs artistic license aggregated over years of experience in a variety of creative fields to create art from what others would likely consider to be scrap, junk or even pure trash. The end results of the ChaseArt process are sculptures, usually in wall-hung formats, which are imbued with the perspective of a machinist, adventurer, novelist, and artist whose work is an assembly product of imaginative design and mechanical craftsmanship.
In a world where many are inclined to dismiss junk materials as worthless pieces of wood, metal and plastic with no further purpose, ChaseArt reanimates the junk, revitalizes the scrap and turns all of what was trash into something others can find as a new element of visual treasure.
Some people find such works to be whimsical, puzzling and entertaining in nature, and often refer to them as Found Art, Steampunk Art or Industrial Art Deco Sculpted Art.
Regardless of its categorical label, ChaseArt is free -form, constructional sculpting (to include made-from-scratch military models) that suggests some type of mechanical function, machine-driven movement and implied purpose; and in spirit it reflects the notion that indeed “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
The artist is Chase Brandon.
While in college he worked full-time as a machinist making airplane and helicopter parts, and was fascinated by the artistic tradecraft of shaping raw metal into precision parts that when assembled enabled large, heavy craft to fly.
After earning advanced graduate degrees in Linguistics he was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency and served most of his 35-year CIA clandestine career living and working in dozens of countries around the world.
He believes that all forms of creative endeavor and varied accomplishments are a function of one’s philosophy about life, to include the combined attitudes of curiosity, exploratory adventure, willingness to take risks and a quest to discover or develop your own best qualities as an individual.
Owing to a considerable academic background in Linguistics, as well as extensive experience in using multiple languages in his decades of professional work overseas, he has a strong interest in the spoken as well as written use of words. Accordingly, ChaseArt incorporates language into its various categories of work, especially with the mechanical Steampunk “sculptures” and facial “portraits”. The whimsical nature of such nomenclature incorporates the use of rhymes, puns, fabricated vocabulary, and other forms of linguistic serendipity to imbue the artwork with an additional quirky and entertaining aspect.