Joshua Newbend
About the Artist
Born in Muscle Shoals, Alabama in 1998, Joshua Newbend is a practicing artist at Columbus State University with a focus in sculpture. From an early age, Joshua has been known to ask questions about anything and everything, which is reflected in his work.
There is a multitude of conceptual foci that are represented through his sculptures. By using different materials such as metal, ceramic, wood, and found objects, Joshua is able to hone the ways in which he wants the work to be represented. Currently using stuffed animals as a material, his work has consisted of connecting adolescence to current ideas and events that are important to him.
About the Artist
Joshua Newbend strives to connect the world with art and new ideas that challenge the way we live and think. Through experimentation and lots of planning and thinking, his work is able to come through lots of perseverance, intuition, and determination.
Newbend's body of work consists of pieces made using stuffed animals titled in a way which pushes the rhetoric of the pieces. Utilizing a helix form, a bodysuit, a vacuum, and video performances in the suit, the motifs in his work including adolescence, natural forms, and the human experience. These themes put the viewer into a train of thought to question society, the interaction of humans and nature, and how adolescence and adulthood are not only linked but how they may function together. By bringing in the use of stuffed animals and popular culture media, he seeks to focus on the ideas of younger individuals. In utilizing the vacuum and the suit for his performance, the work aims for a reaction which questions cleanliness and what one might put on themselves to aid in being an individual, and an adult, within society.
Each piece has connections to these concepts while pushing the viewer to question and prod more about what the piece and those concepts entail. The bodysuit itself as a piece is titled Adolescence is All Fun and No Play; Adulthood is All Play and No Fun, Newbend is trying to communicate how he feels as we transition from childhood to adulthood. He states,"we gain responsibility but lose the enjoyment of the everyday." In his sculpture, Do Not Mistake the Unexpected For Lies, he alludes to how people seem to base prejudice on things they do not understand instead of what is truly false or fact. Each of these works have the potential to bring even one more person to similar ideas of questioning the world, which he feels is highly integral to art and how we interact.