Terms & Conditions
July 13 – 24, 2021
Solo Exhibition by Nathaniel Benjamin
I love the patient, methodical process of carving a block, rhythmically gouging lines into a surface, gradually revealing an image. Printmaking began as a method to produce multiples of an image, to duplicate physical representations. This logic carried through time has given us digital devices that afford individual access to any image, removed from its original place and time, removed from the world we share in common.
Analog immediacy between myself and my work is what I enjoy most about my practice. This immediacy is what separates printmaking, my medium, from the digital world, my subject. When the presence of the human touch is removed, our interactions lack the catalyst for human connection. Through my work, I claim we must rekindle this connection if we hope to retain our ability to act socially.
The central print of this installation started as a digital collage of limbs cropped from photographs of people wrestling. Through this I seek to represent the incendiary nature of our interactions with one another through digital platforms, spaces that incentivize division and, over time, reshape the human behavior that defines our world.
The eye of the viewer looking on to the work is an act of human connection. In this space the viewer is invited to question the meaning they bring to the image, teetering between certainty and doubt. This is a state where one is open to discuss the reality that we share, open to the potential that each of us can participate in an infinite spectrum of experience by attempting to see the world through another’s eyes.