The School of Visual, Performing, and Design Arts Presents: Josh Callaghan: Vehicles

March 30 – May 22, 2026

Artist Lecture on April 30 at 4 p.m.

Fairbanks Gallery, Fairbanks Hall

The Fairbanks Gallery of Art at Oregon State University is pleased to present Vehicles, an exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Josh Callaghan. The exhibition centers on two newly completed sculptures, Big Rig and Death Drive (both 2026), alongside a selection of works spanning the last decade. These include Callaghan’s shoe mandala, Wormhole, Left (2023), a series of toolbox assemblages, Twig Indexes (2022-24), and a modified refrigerator, Monument to World Peace (2017). Taken together, Vehicles functions as a focused survey of an artist whose practice has long orbited the altered found object as an instrument of cultural critique, humor and poetics.

The exhibition’s centerpieces are two large-scale sculptures: a semi-truck and a covered wagon, each constructed using wheelchairs as their chassis. The collision of forms is immediate and loaded. Wheelchairs—objects already dense with associations of disability, health, healthcare, vulnerability, and mortality—are recast as icons of American mobility. The covered wagon conjures the ideology of Manifest Destiny; the semi-truck, the infrastructure of contemporary commercial life. Posed together, Big Rig and Death Drive trace something like a compressed arc of modern American movement.

Wormhole, Left, Callaghan’s shoe mandala, is a wall-mounted arrangement of found shoes organized by size, from infant to absurdly large adult, suggesting an evolutionary sequence - a lifetime captured in a moment. Callaghan’s Twig Index’s stage a quieter tension: found toolboxes filled not with tools but with meticulously arranged twigs. The gesture is comic and melancholic in equal measure, a parody of the human impulse to categorize, systematize, and domesticate a nature that ultimately refuses containment. The tools have been stripped of their function; what remains is the taxonomy itself, the grid of incremental human logic imposed on material that exceeds it. In the context of Vehicles, these works rhyme with the wagon and the truck: each is an artifact of a civilization that mistakes its systems of order for mastery.

A recurring formal preoccupation runs through the exhibition beneath its conceptual surface: tubes. The wheelchair frames, shower grab bars repurposed as exhaust pipes, and oxygen tanks all return to a fascination Callaghan has traced across his practice for years. Tubes and cylinders are, he notes, evocative of the body itself: fingers, limbs, the infrastructure of a human form. In Vehicles, they also become conduits—for movement, for meaning, for the passage of time. The title holds this openness deliberately. A vehicle is a thing that carries: bodies, cargo, history, ideas. Callaghan’s objects do all of these things at once, and invite the viewer to sit with the weight of what they haul.