Art Crush: Jane Benson @ Thierry Goldberg
I Love you Venus by Jane Benson
“In architectural terms, “the mews” refers to stables tucked behind royal London homes, offering sanctuary for falcons during their formative stage of molting. Etymologically, the word “mews” comes from the French “muer,” (‘to change’), but it is also a coincidental homonym of our word “muse,” with its connotations of aesthetic creation. Benson’s work draws on both of these meanings. As if caught in various stages of molting, the work exhibits the transition and transformation of both physical materials and aesthetic identity: marbleized resin simulates Styrofoam, a swan’s wing simulates a hat, a prosthetic limb simulates a tree’s branch. Her playful optimism opens graceful passages for imagined evolutions.
In every phase, Benson finds or cuts her way toward the pleasure and humor in being and becoming something else. As a symbol of this persistent mutability of beauty, the wingless swan in Venus, I Love You stands regally beside a prosthetic limb.”
-Taken from text by Richard J. Goldstein
In a way these ideas of mutability and change remind me of Sarah McKenzie’s work, transforming buildings into abstracted visual spaces objects and the never ending process of construction/evolution.
Benson’s work becomes surreal through pairing, materials, and deconstruction of traditional sculptural elements such as the pedestal and combine to, “upset fixed notions of resemblance .” With McKenzie her work grows more abstract as the image becomes spliced with surfaces and color that do not physically exist in the way they are painted. Line and shape cause the eye to move from foreground to background in an unsettling manner that contradicts how we anticipate the image to be represented. Like a wingless swan the buildings evolve and transform and change into spaces that no longer have the identity that we want to assign to them. An I-beam is no longer a necessary support construction, but used a visual tool to deconstruct.
Interior 1 by Sarah Mckenzie
Jane Benson
The Mews
On view through July 25, 2009.
Thierry Goldberg Projects
5 Rivington Street
New York, NY 10002
