Ben buswell | No Measure
April 22nd - April 30th 2023
Keystone Art Space
338 S Avenue 16, Los Angeles, CA 90031
Opening Reception: 5pm - 8pm on April 22nd
In collaboration with Keystone Art Space, Iris Project Residency is proud to present a solo exhibition of new work by the Portland artist Ben Buswell. Buswell's practice spans multiple mediums, from incised photographs to plastics and ceramics. Buswell's repetitive mark-marking, melting, and tearing highlight the temporality of the natural world. In No Measure, Buswell continues to use photographs as a sculptural medium. These sculptural photographs of water surfaces accentuate the ripples without reference to scale or a horizon. Buswell's tactile and process-based working method creates a shimmering abstract space for your mind to explore.
Iris Project Residency in Los Angeles, California, offers artists, curators, writers, and creative thinkers from diverse backgrounds and disciplines the space and time to push boundaries in their practice. We strongly believe that new directions and insights will emerge when creativity is freed from the pressure of production or material exchange. These benefits will extend beyond the creative's time at the residency. Iris Project Residency is a sponsored project of Venice Arts, a non-profit arts service organization. And a proud partner with The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Yucca Valley Material Lab and The Ford Family Foundation.
“We can never know,” an essay by Joshua West Smith
We can never know.
Or, to put it another way, the inexhaustibility of things results in the inability to know anything fully.
Our understandings, such as they are, are merely pathways generated from experiences and the faith that those experiences will likely repeat in some manner. Through that repetition, we become familiar with a myriad of potential outcomes for an infinite assortment of local events. Thus, the inevitable craft of being dictates that we build skill and knowledge with every passing moment.
Ben Buswell's work has long relied on relatively direct relationships between observable and knowable things. He often uses doubling to trigger a kind of intellectual recursion, be it twin drawings of heroic aircraft motors (Wasps, 2008) or two partial yet yearning ceramic busts on perforated pedestals (Lionsgates, 2011). In the creation of these carefully constructed objects Buswell encodes his true motive. The meaning is in the making, where the question of knowing becomes keenly relevant.
Over the years, Buswell has created a wide-ranging selection of scratched photographs; in them, each mark acts to locate and define an effect of light on the surface, serving to reconfirm, reassure, and reconcile. The struggle to know each cut in the photo is a valiant yet failed attempt to hold the thing in its entirety. Likewise, each ceramic bust made a second time acts to reinscribe the knowledge of its making. These works are tactile exercises in intimacy. And the viewer becomes a confident observer, rewarded through the privilege of intellectually decoding and appreciating not only the labor and marking of time but also the image manifested as an insistent object.
Buswell's newest work is similar to his previous undertakings. It still has robust intellectual underpinnings and intentional craft, but it is different; it is bending, refracting, curving toward a lack of specificity. There is a tangible loosening of the grip. In a piece titled In the Shapes of the Stones, No. 1, from 2020, Buswell is again using photography. The surface of the unfocused photo is adorned with small, slumped glass rondels. The shape of the glass mimics the soft round shapes of recorded light that form the image, but the crisp color and sheen of the glass stands in stark contrast to the muted surfaces it adorns. The work has become a baby bird, held but allowed to twitch and flutter, becoming a blur in the moment.
We cannot know what is in the mind of Ben Buswell as he continues his life of making. But as we look upon a piece like Sorcerer from 2022, the feeling of absence is overwhelming. The kaleidoscope-like image of an empty watery expanse inadvertently conjures thoughts of the artist Bas Jan Ader, who went missing at sea and was never found. Like Ader, Buswell implicates his own body in much of his work as a performer would, so the absence felt when regarding a piece like Sorcerer manifests not only in the vacant expanse within the image but also in front of the work as the vacated space left by the artist who spent countless weeks marking the surface.
Another new work from Buswell, transformed through the process of mold making and metal casting, is a wood burl made in bronze and titled The Well. It's nearly impossible to look upon this stoic mass without being struck by the seemingly limitless variety of nature, the cosmic expanse, and the unknown while simultaneously being confronted by human industry and its history. The singularity of this piece is notable and recalls a past work by Buswell titled St. Thomas from 2010. In St Thomas, Buswell meticulously crafted a hypothetical version of the Notre Dame in Paris proposed by the Victorian Architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. The integrity and grandeur of that piece wilted upon closer inspection when one became aware of the wonkiness in the construction and the unsettled surface. The St Thomas sculpture shows a pinnacle of human architecture and opulence undermined by its abject presentation in lowly fiberboard covered in plaster and viscus yellowing wax. In the face of this, we contemplate our doubts as well as those of Saint Thomas. With The Well, Buswell becomes both the architect and the doubting saint, replacing the towering excess of the cathedral with a thing made by nature and prized for its hidden beauty. With the alchemical transformation of the burl from wood to bronze, the piece is simultaneously simplified and made to be more. The bronze abandons all the cherished interior ornament of the wood original, giving us only surface. Nature's complexity is rendered as a homogenized mass through industry. In The Well, intent and affect bring us to a place of ambiguous poetic potential.
The entirety of Buswell's practice is shifting. We are leaving the concrecity of the early works and entering a new field of possibility. There is still the striking desire to build knowledge, but there is comfort with the unknown, the unfocused. With a loss of focus, we rest in a place where we cannot make comparisons; we understand that the image is unfocused because Ben Buswell believes that within this realm, the realm of the spiritual, there is no measure.
Ben Buswell (b. 1974 in Dallas, Oregon) is an artist and educator based in Portland, Oregon. Buswell's sculptural work spans diverse media, encompassing glass, ceramics, metals, resins, incised photographs and more. He subjects these materials to physical processes (such as scratching, piercing, melting and tearing) wherein the accumulation of small, repetitive gestures build into a complex whole. The aim of all Buswell’s work is to find knowing through physical process.
Buswell received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and BFA from Oregon State University. Buswell is a Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts (2015) and a two-time recipient of the Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and Ford Family Foundation (2014 and 2011) and received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission in 2018. Buswell has had notable solo exhibitions at Upfor, Samuel Freeman in Los Angeles, CoCA Seattle, The Art Gym at Marylhurst University and TILT Gallery and Project Space in Portland. His work was included in Portland2012: A Biennial of Contemporary Art presented by Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, The BAM Biennial in 2016 and The Oregon Biennial at the Portland Art Museum (2006). Collections that house his work include that of Jan and Patricia de Bont and the public collections at Portland Community College, The University of Oregon and the Collaborative Life Sciences Building at Oregon Health and Science University and Western Oregon University. He recently completed commissions for Hyatt Centric and The Ritz Carlton.
Joshua West Smith is an artist, educator, and motorcycle addict living in Southern California's Inland Empire. He teaches Art and Art history at Los Angeles Trade Technical College. Smith received his MFA from the University of California Riverside in 2016 and his BFA from the Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2008. Before pursuing higher education, Smith had a fine job working as a welder, fabricator, and machinist in heavy industry.