In the process of moving between places, I find that the architecture and organization of spaces forms a diorama of emotional memory and lived experience. I seek to conjure my own locations and to create spaces of genuine self expression, self examination, and active engagement with the emotional and social ramifications of aesthetic choice.
I am interested in the abstraction of noteworthy yet everyday objects. These noteworthy objects should transform the places in which they reside. When walking into the Skylark Bar in Chicago it is the screenprint of two grandmothers on a canvas above the photo booth, the velvet curtains, or the masonic seals on silk flags. It can be the album or book on your parent’s shelf whose image captivates one’s young, inexperienced eyes for hours. You imagine the music within, the information it can hold. Perhaps for a moment their form may be vague but nevertheless they form a landmark of the spaces of memory.
I want this work to be ambiguous in its emotions or message, I’d rather the viewer tell me something new.
Geometry plays a large part in these explorations. I am color blind, and while I wish to see color, and I find my most expressive space is in the practice of creating geometry and line. Within these forms I take inspiration from playful, natural, and abstract forms in sculpture, furniture, print, and drawing. My interactions with color will always feel constructed and somewhat unnatural to me, so I find my work especially in the two dimensional form aspiring towards the colors kodachrome with pure color interrupted by texture. My sculptural work consists of installation pieces utilizing modular forms rectangular mostly in wood. They evoke modernist design specifically in relation to minimalism and utopian ideas of the lived space and aesthetic ultimates while also being dialogue with the idea of craft practice and non-artistic ideas of making. These especially have to do with lived space. My work this year began more rooted in these craft practices while I have, in parallel, moved into more surreal and playful work two dimensional works on paper in print and paper that evoke the work of Joseph Cornell and the Chicago Imagists, specifically Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Karl Wirsum. The work of these artists influence me by creating a space of all encompassing creativity within their work. I am interested in how the faces of the artists themselves were not the center of their work, unlike many of their contemporaries. Instead their desire to make their cooperation and the radical originality of each of these artist’s hands is the main feature of their work. The creation of not only two dimensional work but also sculpture as well as publications mirrors my own desires for the dissemination of my work. I seek to deconstruct physical spaces and make the viewer conscious of the gallery space as a conscious medium-like space as the minimalists do while also using disposable-inspired imagery of the Chicago Imagists to evoke a construction of lived space with my other two dimensional works being inspired by John Divola and William Eggleston’s colorful explorations of the minutiae of exterior and interior spaces that take into consideration the bizarre, the dirty, and the bewildering. These two artists are especially important to all of my work because their work always is colored by location and geography, acting as another lense.
My practice takes the form of works on paper using graphite, ink, collage, and pastel alongside print work which utilizes my hand as well as manipulated photography. My work takes into account architectural forms as well as graphic comic and surrealist inspirations. I also work in wood sculpture and furniture, informed heavily by utopian design movements of the twentieth century from the Bauhaus and Eastern Europe. I am interested in the lived experience of modernist design, a prescriptive project that now is as lived in as its precedents were. How have we lived in this new language what new elements have been discovered within.
Central to my work is an understanding of emotion, time, and memory’s interaction with space and place. My emotional memory is intensely tied to place. The Truro pines and sand of my summers with a light that emits a joy I cannot know otherwise and the cedar that holds it. Plain intersecting pine beams filtering the beautiful desolate Cape into even more intense doses. The short tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan with their old immigrant bakeries, bars, and bookstores picked off one at a time. The Hudson Valley lined by aluminum sided Victorian mansions, steep roads, and slowly tortured cliffs into an unforgiving river that reaches the end of the world. Within these abstract notions of place, culture, architecture, and nature they provide an endless world of hope and imagination for me. I want my art to feel the ways that these places feel to me. There is mystery, there is abstraction, but there is also shelter.
BENJAMIN STEVENS