Monday, September 3 - Saturday, October 6
Saturday, September 29 (noon-4pm): Outdoor Sculpture Workshop
Friday, October 5 at 5pm in CFA 107: Lecture and Reception

A Louisville, Kentucky native, Brad McCombs began his career as an artist at dupont Manual High School. In 1997, he earned a BFA at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri and in 2002 an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This year, McCombs has returned to Kentucky to join Northern Kentucky University’s Art Faculty as an Assistant Professor of New Media.

McCombs’ role as an artist is comprehensive and embraces: activism, anthropology, ecology, and sociology. He uses a broad range of materials and works in many mediums, which enable his conceptually driven works to become fully realized. Using these interests he weaves cross-cultural and interdisciplinary elements into a cohesive web.

McCombs has shown both nationally and internationally with exhibits at the Gallery Project (Ann Arbor, MI), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles, CA), SPACELab (Cleveland, OH), the International Arts Festival (Chania, Greece), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, France), a public artwork with the Seattle Arts Commission (Seattle, WA), and a recent solo exhibit at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI).

My role as an artist is comprehensive and embraces: activism, anthropology, ecology and sociology. I look at the world with a broad approach and analyze ways in which humans function. Using these interests I weave cross-cultural and interdisciplinary elements into a cohesive web. From the backyard creek I grew up in, to the cities of Russia I have walked in, I have noted how humans are impacting our world. My early awareness of environmental issues grew into involvement with social issues of inequality, poverty and the consequences of a growing corporate culture. My artwork attempts to increase understanding of how contemporary society operates, and to provide a premise for action and change.

In Setting (St. Louis, Missouri), a combination of installation and happening, I address transportation in our society. Many cities continue to face urban sprawl and as a result more people move to the perimeter of the suburbs. Suburbanites either continue to drive even further to their city jobs or seek employment in decentralized commercial zones. The consequences are deteriorating tax bases in the city, proliferation and expansion of highways and destruction of both human-made and natural made habitats.
Urban centers fall into neglect and abandonment, widening the gap between rich and poor with a physical divide between city and suburbia. Setting responds to this phenomenon. I designed a map that took participants through the city on a path that revealed these issues and culminated in an installation underneath a highway viaduct.

Dispersion is a series of organic floating islands I made to support Mangrove trees to increase their ability to find damaged habitats and prevent erosion. This project came out of my experience living in the Fiji Islands where I came to understand communal life in the village of Soma Soma. The sense of community and sharing was astonishing. In Dispersion, I realized how important sculpture could be in working with people who defined art in a very different way. This particular piece was a direct attempt and metaphor to compensate for ecological damage.

In 2001, I created a public artwork entitled, Hydrological Legends. I was selected by the Seattle Arts Commission in conjunction with Percent for the Arts to be part of Salmon in the City, a project devoted to exploring the survival of Chinook Salmon. Salmon have existed in the Seattle region for millions of years, but in an alarmingly brief time industrialized society has significantly altered their habitat. Seattle, in response to the Endangered Species Act was the first urban area to deal directly with and the conflicts between technology and the environment. These conflicts have far reaching implications for Chinook Salmon and society at large. How can
we as a culture progress in a way that enables other species to flourish as well? Hydrological Legends encouraged the dialogue necessary to answer this question.

The site I chose, the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks particularly signifies the role humans have played in the salmon’s watershed because the locks connect Puget Sound to Lake Washington, providing the only route for migrating salmon species. Visitors experienced muraled pathways alongside robotic salmon as they traversed the impacts of human intervention on Seattle’s
waterways. I created mural maps to convey this complex and changing watershed and made interactive robotic salmon that followed patterns of migration within these murals. Visitors were able to follow the robotic Salmon as they “migrated" along these paths and serenaded participants with such songs as "Take me to the River" and "Don't Worry be Happy". This engagement in historical topography enabled visitors to see how the Seattle community has expanded and severely altered the watershed, transforming the
green sponge of the forest to the gray pavement of runoff.

I want to reiterate how essential an awareness of the interconnectedness of the living and non-living universe are, and that we as humans are included in this system and contribute to its destruction. Charles Krebs, a distinguished ecologist noted, “Ecologists rarely have much to say in policy decisions, and there is a danger that as scientists we may be used as technicians to monitor the demise of the world’s ecosystems.”[1] I hope that artists are not relegated to visualizing that same demise. Instead, it is my desire as an artist to raise ecological and social consciousness, to reach an ever-widening audience through personal and observable experiences. In my work, I strive to challenge culture by considering history and personal beliefs in an attempt to represent and
offer new ideas on how our world functions.