Bryan Czibesz

Starting with hand drawn lines, I combine, stack, and layer shapes and profiles to invent volumes that reference both familiar and unfamiliar forms. These objects, which are made both by hand and with an extrusion clay 3d printer, act as functional pottery, technological markers, and explorations of the layers found in architecture and the landscape, questioning our expectations of interior and exterior space.

These objects start as stacks of 2d drawings which are then built parametrically in code for a 3d printer. They are extrusion-printed in porcelain and combined with hand formed parts.

Imagined and fabricated objects developed from collective and personal histories of place and form.

3d printed and hand built porcelain from photogrammetric digital scans in Budapest, Kiskunfelegyhaza, Rome, and Pompeii.

This work is ongoing.

From the 2019 Northern Clay Center McKnight Catalog:

“While much of ceramic tradition remains unchanged, it’s unlikely that a potter from 100 years ago would recognize the tools of their trade in Bryan Czibesz’s practice. Czibesz’s groundbreaking work was among the first in ceramics to utilize rapid prototyping (3D printing) technology in ways that expanded the field’s understanding of this new tool. Having built ceramic printers and then, having taught others to build and use these complex machine, Czibesz takes his mastery of this tool to the next level, intentionally disrupting and altering his work on multiple levels; in the algorithms and software, in the physically altered printing patterns, and in the manipulation of the printed object. Bryan’s interrogation of both objects and the means of their production suggest a kind of re-making in which objects become subject to new visualization, interpretation, and potential futures.

What does it mean to conceptualize of and interpret history from the perspective of both object and object-maker? For viewers, it might be helpful to start in the inner workings of a 3D printer. Bryan relies on digital technology for both the scanning and printing of objects, using images and an algorithm to translate an object to image and then back to object again. When an object is scanned, it stays still as the computer utilizes photos to create spatial relationships between points, looking at both the object itself and its surrounding context. While most artists would take this information to reproduce an object perfectly, Czibesz is interested in the information deemed unnecessary, the oft-ignored artifacts that this software can leave behind. These “little erratics” as he calls them, might stem from data captured from the background rather than the object itself.

Juxtaposed against the seemingly useless information that forms the “little erratics” are the objects that Czibesz scans and reproduces. Inspired by monuments and souvenirs, Czibesz mines his personal and family history, scanning and documenting everything from the Soviet War Memorial in Budapest to a small, china painted, porcelain mug that belonged to his father’s cousin. In the case of the Soviet War Memorial, Bryan’s scanning and (mis)printing of the object allows for a transformation of meaning and new understanding of a historical monument. In the case of the mug, which features a bird on the handle with broken wings, the re-making of the object monumentalizes something feeble and small, allowing it to endure beyond its physical limitations.

Rendering these scanned objects nearly unrecognizable in his alterations, Bryan Czibesz’s work continues to interrogate our relationships with objects. Whether it’s the discarded information of an algorithm that’s been visualized and printed and fired into permanence, or recognizable forms printed in scribbly lines, Czibesz reminds us of the complexity of the term “handmade.” While “the mark of the hand” has been accepted as the signature of an unalienated maker, what does that mark look like? Czibesz’s work asks: if we are to have a sophisticated and intentional relationship with making and tools, how could we possibly reduce that to a mere fingerprint? Instead, we find the “mark” of the maker in the context of the objects, the altering of the tools, and the little erratics left behind.”

M.C. Baumstark

Imagined and fabricated heirlooms, the result of a search for ways of constructing material artifacts from family history lost in the diaspora of the middle of the 20th Century.

3d printed and hand built porcelain from photogrammetric digital scans in Budapest and Kiskunfelegyhaza, Hungary.

collaboration with Shawn Spangler

Jane Hartsook Gallery, Greenwich House Pottery

February 17 - March 17, 2017

From the Greenwich House Pottery Press Release:

Both the potter’s wheel and clay 3D printer function as fresh tools of invention, bringing undiscovered opportunities for the material. For Czibesz and Spangler, their tools become an extension of themselves. Czibesz fabricates and customizes his 3D printer, instructing the machine how to mold the clay with digital scans, designs and alterations. Spangler uses the potter’s wheel as an efficient, tangible method for forming vessels. His manipulation of the material leaves impressions on the clay. With this unification of two contrasting tools, Czibesz and Spangler demonstrate the intersection between past human activities and cultural materials of the future. Spangler states “we bestow these objects with the power to narrate our experience...” guiding us to locate “where we once were and where we are going.” Together, they question authorship, explore artifacts and present us with dazzling emblems of this process.

collaboration with Shawn Spangler

Curated by Anna Walker and installed at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in 2013, the work in this exhibition is a further exploration of the processes begun in Mapping Authorship and featured the work of artists working with 3D printing, open source software, and digital crafting tools.

The exhibition traveled to the Center for Craft, Creativity & Design in Asheville, NC in 2014.

c.r.e.t.a. Rome and NCECA International Residency Exhibition

collaboration with Jessica Brandl

Decontextualized sherds in vitrines and archaeological texts conjure strong desires for us to understand them through touch. Employing the use of traditional and digital visualization and modeling strategies, we have sought to excavate and reimagine sources ranging from Etruscan bucchero and Roman Aretine ware to fragments from the trash heaps excavated from the ruins at Pompeii. Our use of emergent ceramic 3D printing allows the oldest material technology to create a bridge to a deeper history, allowing us to shake hands with the craftsman of antiquity, and speak to both past and future archaeology.

collaboration with Shawn Spangler

Exploring the ways that culture, labor, art, utility, and technology are implicitly tied, the exhibition Re / Charting focuses on the differences and similarities between hand-forming processes and digital reproduction technologies. Re / Charting not only probes how new tools can be used in the creation of new forms and surfaces, but also considers theoretical questions regarding the slippery boundaries between convention and invention.

During the summer of 2014, I was a guest artist-in-residence at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, in Honolulu, HI where I collaborated with Shawn Spangler on work for an exhibition at the University Art Gallery.

Our points of departure were three historical objects selected from the John Young Museum. These three objects were digitally scanned and reproduced in a variety of ways. First, the objects were reproduced at their original scale as exactly as the digital processes would allow (see Re / Charting Historical Objects and Narcissism below). Additionally, the digital scans were used in whole and in parts in a remaking, reconfiguring, and remixing process that was a search for new formal and material territory.

Using an extrusion-based ceramic 3D printer that i built for the project, we were able to 3D print the same clay used for generating form on the wheel and by hand, allowing for a depth of collaboration on each individual object that would be impossible with other digital and 3D printing processes.

All the digital models were also reproduced on my CNC machine as a drawing that is at once a continuous scroll, a document of our process, and a nautical chart exploring the territory we charted.

The exhibition also featured solo work from both artists, which can be found under Breathe, Diagnostics, and Assessment under my Portfolio page and on Shawn Spangler’s website.

Installed at the Seattle Design Center in 2012, Mapping Authorship is a collaborative map of artistic authority made by recontextualizing two historic objects through traditional hand-forming methods and digital 3D modeling processes.

Ceramic history is implicitly tied to ideas of culture, labor, art, utility, and technology. As our means of producing functional vessels has evolved, technological development has served to define a boundary between old and new, marking the differences between materials, means of firing, and the tools used in the production process.

Mapping Authorship explores the ways prime objects can be interpreted through both traditional methods and the introduction of new tools. The resultant work presents a spatial map of artistic authorship through object transformation and re-contextualization from two points of origin, and it explores the range of practices necessary to trace the shape of time across these boundaries.

In Mapping Authorship, we sought to exploit the differences and similarities between hand forming processes and digital reproduction technologies. The work invokes questions not only about how new tools can be used in the creation of new forms and surfaces but also about how the boundaries between old and new are often not particularly distinct in the context of the authority of discrete objects and the ultimate fallacy of individual authorship.

Formalization

Symmetric balance

Tracing topographic memory

Re-sanctification

Working from quick gestures, two-dimensional sketches are analyzed and then converted to vectors. These two dimensional paths are then redrawn as spatial gestures and SLS 3d printed.

These objects are in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art.

In this work, I have formalized the building blocks of technology--the lever, inclined plane, wheel and axle, pulley, wedge, and screw,--as prototypes that explore the purpose of what we build in the physical world. Known as the Six Simple Machines, they represent the fundamental ways of achieving mechanical advantage (amount or direction of force) in the physical world beyond our physiological limitations.

Beginning with small explorations of form with a conspicuous record of their making, initial handbuilt earthenware objects were imported in to the digital environment with a three-dimensional scanner and then reproduced on a CNC (computer numeric control) machine in a prototyping material. This process transformed the evidence of the hand through the interpretation of both the eye and the hand of a machine.

The machinable wax prototypes are impermanent material objects in manufacturing. In order to preserve them as a record of process, they are reproduced in vitreous porcelain as production objects and cast in sugar as consumable objects. This progression parallels that of technology in general, which has as its ostensible goal the incremental removal of the body in relation to the material, even though the body itself is always the operative.

Viewers are invited to explore the history of this process--from the marks of the hand through the interpretation of hand of the machine--with their own senses. I have also engaged in a reinvestigation of this process through the construction of the forms once again, as small iconic earthworks in unfired earthenware. This all serves the purpose of bringing the work back to the human body, and highlights the inherent contradictions present in technology, which is the manifestation of our ability—and desire—to transcend the limitations of our physiology.

The human relationship to technology can often simply be reduced down to this: a material struggle to reconcile the limitations of our physiology in the context of our cognitive and emotional being. In Breathe, I have proffered a device that serves as a prosthetic attempt at understanding the role of geographical location in this struggle. Latitude +39° 57' 8.63", longitude -75° 9' 48.91" is somewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania.

Breathe

Glazed porcelain, CNC-cut plywood heightfield generated from +39° 57' 8.63", -75° 9' 48.91", CNC-cut acrylic, aluminum, steel, stainless steel, brass, vinyl, urethane, cork, polyethylene, compressed air

Viewer operated


50h x 42w x 28d


2011