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Jon Bobby Benjamin cv | statement

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The ghosts of an industrial past linger in our present, leaving a permanent footprint, an afterimage that can never fully be razed or removed. My recent work focuses on these architectural remnants – defunct houses and barns, weathered structures, and disintegrating object-artifacts. It draws on the urban landscape of Philadelphia and DC, as well as on the scenery of my hometown, a small working-class coastal city in Massachusetts. I present massive, impersonal, decaying structures lifted from these locales as delicate and intimate spaces by recreating them on a minute scale. I also try to make the viewers of my work more aware of, and active participants in, the process of viewing.

I have pushed my newer work into the realm of pastiche, using recognizable imagery drawn from America's visual history as a point of departure. Much of my work builds off of what others have claimed America looks like or should look like. I am interested in creating a visual language of nostalgia and familiarity, and then slightly altering and complicating that language. Houses have become a dominant theme in my imagery, often serving as entry points for the viewer, and creating a sense of scale for the pieces. My interest in architecture (and landscape) comes from its innate ability to bear the markings of the passage of time. Creating desolate, long-abandoned structures allows me to get glimpses of a human-constructed world that may exist in a static, post-human time. My newest work has focused on hypothetical historical amalgamations that I use to create a parallel, contemporary world. I push my work to be multi-faceted, to create content that exists in the overlap and convergence of media (drawings, sculptural objects, photographs), as if I am documenting these alternate worlds or imagined pasts. The work is research-intensive, drawing from colonial American texts, especially early Puritan writings, as well as the notions of Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism.

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education
2006
B.A. Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. Double Major in Fine Art and History.
selected exhibitions
2010
Cream: WPA Art Auction Exhibition, Katzen Arts Center at American University, Washington, DC
 
Call & Response, Hamiltonian Gallery, Washington, DC
2009
SCOPE Miami, Miami, FL
 
Beacon Puritanus, Hamiltonian Gallery, Washington, DC
 
New. (Now)., Hamiltonian Gallery, Washington, DC
 
This Is The End, Little Berlin, Philadelphia, PA
2008
Quart Bag, Civilian Arts Project, Washington, DC
2007
Homo Ludens, Bobby Fisher Memorial Building, Washington, DC
 
Aleatoric, Bobby Fisher Memorial Building, Washington, DC
2006
Sixteen, Dreitzer Gallery, Waltham, MA
awards/grants
June 09 - present
So-Hamiltonian Artist Fellow. Washington, DC
July 2005
Remis Travelling Artist Grant. Los Angeles, CA
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