Andrew Benson

I will be in a show called “Excavations” at Johansson Projects Gallery in Oakland,CA. The show opens May 12th, with a reception that evening and also another one on June 1st during the Oakland Art Murmur, 6-9pm. The gallery will also be open Thurs.-Saturday, noon-6pm, during the rest of the show. This is the first show at the new gallery, and will include work by eight other artists in various media. My contribution to the show is 16 paintings, 9 video pieces, and one felt and thread landscape installation. For more info, check out the gallery website.

Since I am always compiling lists of books and articles for imaginary lectures and classes that I will never teach, I decided I should take a moment to start a sort of Bibliography of my thought processes.

I will be adding to this as time permits:

• “The Production of Space”, Henri Lefebvre.
• “Rhythmanalysis”,Henri Lefebvre.
• “Collecting Contemporary”,
• “A Thousand Plateaus”, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
• “1000 Years of Non-Linear History”, Manuel DeLanda.
• “Invisible Cities”, Italo Calvino.
• “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense”, Friedrich Nietzche
• “Hardware Hacking: Handmade Electronic Music”, Nic Collins
• “The History of Sexuality”, Michel Foucault
• “Six Memos for the Next Millenium”,Italo Calvino
• “Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus”, Ludwig Wittgensteing
• “The Question Concerning Technology”, Martin Heidegger
• “A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity”,Manuel Delanda.

The series “tiny continent” is a set of photographs of ephemeral sculptures created by stacking and clustering little bits of model-making wood and other bits of material. This investigation started as a game that I would play in my studio as part of the process for making other work. While I was photographing works for an upcoming show, I decided I should also start documenting these little piles that appear in my studio. The documentation and presentation of this as an art project changes the context slightly and even calls into question my own assumptions about what “my work” has become. In some ways, these little one-minute sculptures are the most vital and personal work that I am doing. It is a little window into my larger artistic process.

To be shown at the show “Excavations” at Johansson Projects, I have produced an edition of 50 DVDs complete with hand-printed silkscreen cover insert. The “cloud gardens” video series comprises a collection of work done in developing real-time video and audio synthesis and processing modules using MaxMSP/Jitter visual programming environment. The nine videos represented were projected in the gallery as part of the work that I have contributed, along with several paintings and a site-specific installation.

If you are interested in screening these videos or purchasing a copy of the limited edition DVD, please email me for info.