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Celestial Array

“Snowden’s bronzes sing the cosmos.”

 

In this collection of dynamic bronzes, Snowden celebrates radiant interstellar bodies that exert perennial influence on earth’s planetary sphere.

Meteorite

Snowden’s Meteorite careens downward on a collision course with earth. In Meteorite, Snowden shapes interplanetary matter transformed into flame upon entry into earth’s atmosphere. No other Snowden sculpture evokes such a vivid, fateful moment wherein the terrestrial and extraterrestrial meet. The sheer exuberance of Snowden’s signature handwork shines in this animated bronze. Indeed, the implications of interstellar life coming to earth is written upon every dimension of the bronze. In its larger context, Snowden’s Meteorite contemplates the supreme moment of creation. As a composition Meteorite exists seed-like in form, complete in its beginning that in turn evokes immense possibilities arising at the moment of its destruction.

Lunas

Lunas reflects the silvered arc of the moon. Through a highly tactile and shining surface, Snowden explores the concept of the moon as a reflector of a portion of the sun’s energy as well as albedo – the reflected light of earth. As bronze, the work considers states of mood, energy and radiance across a range of dimensional nuances that vibrantly interact with natural light. Lunas’s levitated weight burgeons from its cratered environment, pivoting on an awakened sense of balance. Over hundreds of hours, Snowden has conjured a white-veined variant of the historic Fournier patina that promotes a smooth glowing surface on bronze.

Polaris

Polaris is a shining nucleus surrounded by an energy web. In beholding glazed Polaris, many hours of an annealing specialized touch has awakened an extraordinary tactile surface that encloses humanity’s completed nucleus of form. The sculpture immortalizes this formation that appears across various incarnations through human and cosmic structures. If indeed the universe is an expression of fractal mathematics as has been described by Wolfram and Mandlebrot, then Polaris forms a cutting edge portrait of fractal scale that reverberates, repeats and reveals a pantheon of related forms across the universe. Iron, copper, tin, lead, silicon, gold, silver, titanium, platinum, and other ores smelt together in the bronze amalgam of Polaris, just as interstellar cores on much larger scales, spectrographically radiate these and other elements. Within each step of Snowden’s creation of the clay to the pouring of bronze, Polaris’s burgeoning sculpted form gradually condenses sculptural materials that signal Snowden’s art as an octave universal force.

Solaris

Snowden’s Solaris evokes the radiant nucleus of the sun. As an auteur of bronze extrusion and experimental welding protocols, Snowden orchestrates the composition to emit thin dramatic bronze rays as an "energy corona pattern" generated by the heart of the star. With metallurgical subtlety, Snowden suggests a solar portrait that provokes intense consideration on every level of the bronze, from the gestural hands to the coronal mass ejection that sweeps the composition into a lyrical band that frames Solaris’s facial mask. Like Polaris, Solaris conveys a greater sense of dynamism through a composition that suggests that evolving suns configure energy transmissions in off-centered patterns. In Solaris, fractal patterns resonate within figural musculature and asymmetrical spiked whorls that have been generated from the charged fingers and tools of the sculptor.

Heliocore

A curtain of foundered ores ejects the sun’s fire, shaping a single ray. Heliocore is that solitary sculpture that surges upwards as a signpost of Snowden’s meditation on the elemental connections that exist between bronze, human physicality, and our closest star, the sun. In Snowden’s fractal mathematical meditation, the entire wick or nucleus of the sun is re-projected in each of its rays and thus in Snowden’s Heliocore, we meet a similitude of the central figural core of Solaris in this solar arm. The same elements that are recognized in spectrographs of the sun also exist within the natural planetary metals that compose bronze. These same sun elements also exist within our own beings and are expressive of a deep continuum and relationship. Heliocore reasserts the sculptor’s central idea that the powers and energies of titanic geological and celestial phenomena are octaves of our own potentialities and substance. Indeed, the curved scarf of Heliocore’s composition reflects the "S" of light wave energy that infuses all creation.

Sirius

Sirius throws fireworks heavenward. In Snowden’s studio, Sirius’s nucleus is an explosion where metal pushes and pulls from a central detonation like arcing trails of dynamite. Sirius, a white A-type star constituting the brightest star in the night sky, stands at the heart of the ancient calendar that underlies our present transformed system of time measurement. Here in this highly personal bronze, expressionistic figuration deforms into myriad profiles that configure the relationship of humankind to the stars; not only as a source of observation but upon the deeper elemental substance of our own physicality in connection to the origins of the cosmos. Viewing Snowden’s Sirius, one can trace the expressive gesture of the sculptural icon reaching toward the goal of a chased bronze arc; a gesture made possible through a constellation of hammered weld points.

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