Stan Buglass (b. 1999, London, UK) lives and works in London, UK, and Phoenix, USA. His work highlights industrial objects, architecture, and the street to offer a study of the manmade. Buglass’s formal investigations come from reflections on his personal and familial working life and become process heavy cross-sections of the freeway, sites of labour, machines, and the bodies that operate within them. Buglass earned his BA from Central Saint Martins in 2021 and will earn his MFA at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute class of 2026.
Buglass’s work details the weathered faces of ageing architectures and estranged, tired machines. Painting and relief become representations of the infrastructure our lives are reliant upon, layered in oil, dust, and grit. Originating from photographs, they are relics of architectural mouldings taken from the freeway underpass and other strange and overlooked corners of the city. Taken at speed these images have a sense of motion blur and become memories of a recent past. They are programmed to become freeze-frame relief, or carved hieroglyphs of the sludge of the everyday. They present to us ergonomic environments of industrialised labour and display the layered material entropy and dereliction of street-facing walls.
Found automotive forms and worn-out mechanical appliances are sculpturally re-appropriated as remnants and cast-offs from scrapyards and other lands of obsolescence. They are echoes from motorised economies of production and are representative of sweaty and grimy bodily engines of operation. These mechanical representations of exhaustion are regenerated and restored into new forms that produce a sense of material and human potentiality, and act as valued memories of commercialised cultures of being. Buglass employs methods of abstraction to intensify the materiality of industrialised working life, its nuances, and grey areas in relation to methods of economic production and unbalanced practices of labour.