Reuben Brown (b. 2001) is a sculptor and new media artist, specialising in CG animation and installation. He is currently based in Belfast, N. Ireland after completing his BFA Fine Art Sculpture/Lens, at Belfast School of Art. Recent CG Films include “VIOLET STEEL” (2022), “SATIN CHROME” (2022) and his most recent “INFINITE VIOLENCE” (2022).

“I am a sculptor and new media artist currently based in Belfast, N. Ireland. Through my artistic practice, I combine CG (computer-generated) animation, with mould-making and casting, sculpture, and installation, with textual and performative elements being crucial to my artistic process.

The main overarching intention of my artistic practice is to satisfy an attempt to consider and self-actualise my queer (specifically queered-masculine) identity within the contexts of the constantly fluctuating and mercurial hyper-reality which surrounds us. It is concerned with exploring themes of digitisation, quasi-religious worship, masochistic sacrifice and our collective relationships with our identities, bodies and the Internet, whilst simultaneously appreciating and critiquing the various fetishistic and self-destructive identities we forge and perform as on the Internet.

I approach these themes through a lens of queer nostalgia and potential, as my practice is often very inwardly reflective; modelling, meshing, animating and depicting scenes and objects which are directly extracted from my formative years growing up on the outskirts of a small town in South Down, alongside abstract memories and glamourised notions, and recontextualising them within various destructive, yet sensationalised hyper-real CG worlds and sequences.

As a teenager catalysed by queer rural-frustration, I often romanticised a self-actualisation, a realisation of queer potential, which was aesthetically concerned with the concept of the city as a melding pot of opportunity, excitement and inclusivity. As a result, my practice is saturated with imagery of sports cars and motorways, neon structures, glossy bathroom tiles and the glamourised queered-masculine form, which is often channelled in the sculptural aspects of my practice.

Right now, I have been working on a series of non-linear, semi-autobiographical CG films which are not necessarily narrative, but are inherently inter-linked. They loosely follow a queered-masculine figure whose identity is unknown, who apparently accidentally survives some kind of apocalyptic event/Armageddon. The figure becomes burdened with the responsibility of being the last living example of humanity and then becomes subjected to a seemingly infinite violence of repetitious, un-consensual transfiguration.”