Monthly Archives: October 2012

Ben Weiner’s first solo exhibition at the Benrimon Contemporary, on view until December 15, includes paintings, a multi-channel video installation, and sculptural objects.

Ben Weiner
Shrine, 2012
Oil on canvas, 52 x 78 inches

Engaging in a variety of media, ranging from Weiner’s signature large-scale paintings and time-lapse videos to a series of sculptural objects, SMUSH explores a process-based narrative, adapting medium specificity for the reality television era. The exhibition explores the structure of paint at a microscopic level, unveiling the organic origins of a man-made material.

Weiner bases his paintings on highly magnified views of the paint on his palette. Viewed at a perspective alien to the naked eye, blobs of paint appear as organic terrains and hyperpigmented, trompe l’oeil landscapes. These paintings chart the evolving topography of his palette, with the process creation of one painting generating source imagery for the next.

In addition to the paintings, the exhibit will present new videos and sculptural objects. Weiner’s time-lapse video projections magnify the process by which pigment, linseed oil, varnish, and turpentine are mixed together to make paint, distilling days of footage into several minutes. The resulting videos bring the viewer into a fantastical molten universe, where landscape and material is ever in flux.

For the first time in his career, Weiner will exhibit sculptural objects, crystalline forms grown from the minerals in paint pigment. By dissolving these minerals into solutions and letting them evaporate in molds, Weiner channels the natural processes by which crystals form. The objects meld glamour with the organic, while reassessing the cycle of nature and artificiality.

Ben Weiner was born in 1980 and lives and works in New York City. His work has been included in exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Carnegie Art Museum, The Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University, and The Riverside Art Museum. Weiner has had two solo exhibitions with Mark Moore Gallery in Los Angeles, and his works are in the permanent collections of the Sammlung Mondstudio (Germany), Progressive Insurance (Ohio), and the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (California). In 2010 Weiner was awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.