Brian McCutcheon

May-June 2009

About the Artist

Brian McCutcheon b. 1965 in Traverse City, Michigan, currently resides in Indianapolis, IN. Brian attended the University of Michigan (1984-88), Colorado State University (BFA 1991) and Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA 1995). He is currently teaching at the School at the Art Institute of Chicago and at Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. Brian has recently completed public works for the Indianapolis International Airport and the White River State Park and is scheduled for a solo exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2011.

Project Description

The works made during my Sculpture Space residency include 3 dimensional renderings and objects that explore themes relative to the Apollo Missions to the Moon and how those events reflected American ideas of masculinity.  My own reexamination of this time period has come through exploring it with my 5 year old son and witnessing his boyhood understanding of the wonder of these events as contrasted with my own contemporary adult view and childhood recollection.  My son's interest in space travel is parallel to the actual events during the same point in my childhood (he is 4-5 years old now and I was 4-5 years old at the time of Apollo 11).  The flights to the moon represent an extreme form of human imagination and will – and an extraordinary leap of risk and faith. The objects that we associate with these events are peculiarly modern yet nostalgic, being simultaneously highly technological and fantastical, and the works I worked on explore that duality as a parallel to the man/boy conflict in every father and son. I began with a transformation of the real (self-portrait of me at 4 years old using Angus as a model – child/man) and the Splashdown (imaginative play with common things to make an animated recreation of the Apollo 11 splashdown).  I made a series of distorted photographic self-portraits (at play to reveal inner self images) and automotive paint panels that mimic large scale childlike drawings. I began a sculpture based on the deep space probe, Voyager.