Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Guy Benfield solo exhibition at Art in General, New York

Guy Benfield’s Night Store will be an eight-week long performative installation in Art in General’s Storefront Project Space.

Drawing on tropes of modernism, faux ceramics, sculpture, painting, collage, and references to alternative collectives, Benfield transforms the architecture of space from white-box gallery to pottery showroom, to artist studio, and eventually overcrowded storage-space.

Through various situational episodes in this non-stop evolution, Benfield explores the relation between current artistic practice and supposedly defunct strains in performance including ritual, transcendency in Aktionism, and live-action painting. Imagining the trauma of pottery as an expressionist dialogue, Benfield considers the space of the storefront as a kiln in which failure and unpredictable success commingle while pretense is burned away.