GD WRIGHT 

ARTIST BIO:

Gd Wright is an Austin based artist with a background in large scale sculptural design and fabrication. In tandem with his work, he has become fixated on the creation of low cost and community based, studio spaces for artists. Along his journey as an artist, fabricator, and social justice advocate, the strength he has found in others has ingrained in him a keen awareness of just how important community is within a healthy art ecosystem.

A selection of some of the organizations he has worked with include; The Carver Museum (Austin), Art in Public Places (Austin), California Academy of Sciences (San Francisco), Stanford Complexity Group (Stanford), the Exploratorium (San Francisco), the restorative justice design firm Designing Justice, Designing Spaces (Oakland), and Branded Arts (LA). Wright’s project teams have been awarded grants from the Cultural Arts Division in Austin, the Rauchenburg Foundation, Google Impact Grants, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, and Burning Man. Wright’s quest to provide low cost studios has led to the creation of 140 studio spaces for Austin artists, housed within Bolm & Good Dad Studios. 

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My sculptural work is driven by the goal to arouse a deep visceral response in the viewer.  I work to achieve this by creating a heightened tension in the interaction of two systems, defined as rigid and fluid. Steel structures, once assembled into a specific form, are fixed and unchanging. The fluid systems they contain introduce a temporal element in which there is no longer a definite object, but a shifting one. The use of a steel mold elicits the feeling of an unchanging model, yet the bulbous forms interact with this foundation in abstract, organic, and often unexpected ways. I draw inspiration from larger systems found in nature and society, which represent the push and pull of containment and expansion, strength and fragility, and change and inertia. This interplay creates a push and pull that is dynamic, as perception of the work becomes reliant on the individual's own deep emotive response as they perceive it.