Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, by Robert Sparrow Jones

Benjamin Duke’s paintings that make up “A River Without Banks,” hosted by the Paul Collins Art Gallery in Grand Rapids, MI, are as rich and layered an experience as the concepts behind the work. Whatever meaning you ascribe to the action–personal, civic, divine, or none at all–it is certain they will leave their mark. Each work is a complicated, feral environment—a portrait of a personal and universal mash-up of transcendence.

Benjamin Duke, “Crash”, 75 x 94”, 2009

During the artist opening, Duke stood before a crowded gallery and carried forth his mellifluous, spirited talk. A rich stew of complex material was made a little more accessible, and certainly enjoyable, via rhetorical flourishes, brilliant connections to poetry, philosophical discourse, and art theory. Sometimes, when it slipped into the candid portal of his own methodology—home life, fatherhood, teaching—Duke set up the necessary scrims as a prism for us to look through. All the while, his painted figures budded behind him, teetering from his large canvases into something new and a bit wild.

Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, at the GRCC Collins Art Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan

These are not sedentary works. Each painting burgeons with energy. People, objects, and spaces lure us inside to explore ideas concerning our current state of multiplicity. Actions and shifting grounds overlap the way human experience intersects. Invisible strings that tie us to the world cross and weave. This culmination of relationships and experiences imprint themselves on the viewer. They overwhelmingly represent a society of the intimate and casual connections that inhibit and build our own world. For Duke, this is where the abstract, the expression, and the figural shift and unite to create a vortex. This brings us from a state of internal weaving to a new ground of cataclysmic budding. In each work, the illusory complex, centered by this action, suggests the eternal present.

Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, at the Collins Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan

In, “Crash” a highway leads to a city, palatable of multiple intersections and boundless altering grounds. The highway is weighted with traffic and the vigor of a city wrought with possibilities forebodes in the distant. Before that, literally exploding into a new ground, Duke’s vortex takes the the form of a just-crashed and air-bound convertible. Ecstatic and uncaring, bodies are caught suspended, ejecting as a signifier of constant change. This conceptual architecture is uncentered and frenetic as behaviors, actions, and reactions come together full-force in a new dynamic, contributing to the particular transformative gestalt. The fictive world designed from those physical things forms the vortex that grows and surges toward us and locks us in. These are inescapable experiences, however momentary, however perpetually happening. It is as if Duke were stating that in the lived-in world we are untethered, though the ensuing chaos allows for wonder and grace.

Benjamin Duke, “The Compatibilists”, 62 x 93”, 2014

Although Duke’s work is intentionally rooted in a deep philosophical discourse, it is ultimately seeded in reciprocation. Here the work becomes a truth, which makes the abstract knowledge possible. Through a construct of recognizable objects and people it makes the death-defying action accurate, as in “Crash.”  But he sometimes uses terrific humor, such as in “Enter the Dragon.” Here the vortex is imbued with a teetering stack of animal, insect, and human sinew.  In the back field, behind the stack, a light, but looming architecture repeats that shape on a different ground. Duke accomplishes his humor underscored by a lack of certainty, such as in “The Combatibilists.” Here it is through the contrast of flat apparition-like shapes verses illusory space. I think Duke wants us to not experience his illusions directly, but mediated through other entities in some shared sensual space, the way his figures in “The Combatibilists” actively suggest while drinking tea. The action of disorder is a symptom of something greater, foreboding and ungraspable in its entirety.

Benjamin Duke, “Enter the Dragon”, 48 x 98”, 2013

In the lexicon of Duke’s work, lies the idiosyncratic, drawing attention to and describing of, the role of the notion of a lived-experience, lived-objects, and the present moment. There is an apparent bodily engagement and primacy in which Duke’s living connections intermingle in the world. They intertwine and resonate with a reciprocating action. Imagining multi-sensory worlds, Duke offers different levels of detail, space, light, shadow, and color with both control and abandon of the medium which creates the illusion of a multi-sensory world, embodying the corporeal and sensory dimensions all at once.

Benjamin Duke, “I’m Not Your Superman”  98 x 98”, 2013

What keeps us tethered is Duke’s perception and skills at building his worlds. However, Duke adroitly pursues abstraction and distortion without jettisoning the sensuous surfaces of objects and space. “I’m Not Your Superman” illustrates objects, figures, and space with a sense of material expression—soft, hard, cold, gritty. In visually explaining the reality of objects with textures and wear, there entails the mark of body experience. These descriptions bring specific features of that lived-experience into greater perspicuity through the distortion. This is true especially in “The Cobatibilists” where multiple perspectives and ground shifts suggest the act of seeing, and therefore consciousness. Duke’s world’s are germinating and fill up like a tableau. There is a more fundamental realm of human experience through distortion—more attuned to the actual way in which we see the world. These elements keep us looking because they feel primal. They are true and we recognize without doubt direct qualities of the physical world.

Benjamin Duke, “Nature vs Nature”, 72 x 93″, 2014

It’s not just about the illusory worlds where Duke finds center. The magic is perhaps something beyond. A liminal and urgent paint language necessitates the viscous strata Duke incarnates into the work as a body memory. Even from five feet the viewer can experience the illusions being created, the invisible made viable. So fresh it seems; again, always at present. So apparent that we are able to imagine the artist in the act of imagining while simultaneously constructing the moment. He is caught up, intensely intertwined in the midst of making all tangible. Duke is working these surfaces but he is also breaking the surfaces. This is where I think Duke embodies the concept with which he is trying to communicate. We are watching an imagined and physical experience rather than just seeing a perceptual illusion.

Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, at the Collins Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Duke intertwines lives to remind us that the multisensory experience can be a terribly beautiful and disastrous experience. His constructs are reflective illusions where spaces are about the body’s existence in the world, the body’s activity in the world. It is important that these are worlds that have been lived in so that pondering them we don’t feel external to them. He organizes and gives structure to different grounds through which he is positioning us. When these grounds intersect a vortex blossoms. The amplification denotes specific, important changes that occur in the physical process of creation where, in the exaggeration, lies deep significance.

Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, at the Collins Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Yet Duke’s paintings tell us one more secret. Duke is at his sharpest when his poetic and allusive language of materials and perceptions appear to prefigure what will be seen. Detailing the tacit, pre-reflective relationship between experience and the built world, Duke seems to be painting experience, as he is receiving it. The descriptive evidence points to that of awareness. For Duke, painting is close to the palpable life of things and the world around him. We experience Duke looking and studying and ultimately reveling in the wonder and mystery of the now. We feel that. We feel his now.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2015/01/benjamin-duke-a-river-without-banks/

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/author/robert-sparrow-jones/

Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, at the Collins Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Symptomatic Constant: Julie Schenkelberg, by Robert Sparrow Jones, Michigan Quarterly Review, November, 2014

The first tinge of autumn spiked the air as the streets of downtown Grand Rapids teemed with artgoers for ArtPrize, 2014. A curious line had already formed down Ionia Street, excitedly inching toward the doors of the old Morton House which was once an opulent 1920s hotel. After bankruptcy and a stint as rent-subsidized housing, the place has been vacant and boarded up, save for this year’s excellent SiTE:LAB exhibition.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Installation View 1,
SiTE:LAB at ArtPrize, 2014

When I entered the multistoried ghost of a hotel, a continuous dank breeze pushed against the inside corridor, a short and dark walk under disintegrating ceilings with ominous gaping steel-meshed holes and crumpling plaster corners. The central lobby then opened up to a spectacularly dusty and ambient light where, encompassed by the walls of curling paint, Julie Schenkelberg’s sublime installation “Symptomatic Constant” sat corpulently like a shipwreck.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail, 2014

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Piano View, 2014

Within the materials lies Schenkelberg’s remarkable talent for recapturing wonder. “Symptomatic Constant” is a massive work. It starts as rubble on the marble floor with plaster dust and shards of ceramic, resembling a shore of beach glass, then steadily the work grows up into the high space of the lobby’s ceiling with fabric draped from an old cast-iron heating register. Schenkelberg builds in layers with architectural salvage culled from the site itself as well as local thrifting. Her cultural archeology is distinctive in its details and restless as the whole of her ship-like installation.

Schenkelberg is a collector. She has an eye for timelessness in the materials she selects and remains an architect of renewal. This is not a matter of optimism, or recovery in any conventional sense. Rather, her voice in this work feels like that of survival, which is manifest in her abstracted ship-run-aground form. In materials, I feel her central obsession is not to preserve the past but rather to borrow it, paint with it, use it as her expression. Her incredible wonder of the antiquation plays on the collective memory of our object’s past. She rescues the perishing for a reason. The curation of materials contains a spirit, a ghost, a memory. Whether it be a worn-out grand piano (original to the hotel) or stacks of indiscrete linens, the materials resonate above their own presence. Schenkelberg’s work here is an adventure, comprised of her poetic collections without being precious. She acts as a poet who describes with pale, faded metaphors to build a wonderfully strange atmosphere.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 3, 2014

Looking at her work, you can envision Schenkelberg developing a specific language of things in new and surprising ways like a painter. She has a rich vocabulary of ethereal, antiquated items, such as milk glass, stacked valises, and tattered leather-bound books. She amends them with chalky robin’s egg blue and pink pastel paint the consistency of cake icing, taken from the cues of a delicately crumbling architecture. Rendered further, you can see the artist’s expression in the repetition of drilled holes, slashing cut marks, and smashed ceramic. Her hand denotes an authority that immediately gains the viewer’s trust. Her fiction envelops us in a sublimity, where even the heavy mildew fragrance of wet plaster from the old hotel’s depths adds to the authenticity.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 4,
SiTE:LAB at ArtPrize, 2014

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 6, 2014

While the mythic analogies swelled up in a hull of archaic architectural sinew, I wondered what side of the story we may bring ourselves. This fiction is a dazzle but can offer more than just a touch of fatalism. It quickly brought to mind, “The Raft of Medusa,” 1818-1819, Théodore Géricault’s iconic masterpiece of French Romanticism. Géricault’s painting depicts the aftermath of a warship wreck off the coast of Senegal in 1816. Due to a shortage of lifeboats, 147 people were left behind to fend for themselves on a makeshift raft. They drifted for 13 days before the rescue of only 10 survivors. The disaster worsened by starvation, dehydration, and cannibalism that ensued and each of the figures in the painting tells the story. Géricault assiduously researched the horrific, then contemporary, incident and was able to question survivors. He even sketched them as well. Géricault built wax models and figurines and had the original carpenter of the Medusa build a scale model of the raft. He studied cadavers and body parts, visited hospitals and beaches—there is no mistaking his obsession for detail in his many sketches. It’s famously captured in the final larger-than-life painting as two intersecting pyramids of figures. On the left side, death is darkly descending in the expiration of life from an improvised mast against a foreboding weather system. On the right is hope in the ascension of bodies to the waving flag at a passing ship. Horrific and fascinating. There is no real resolve. Perhaps there is just a tinge of hope in the light and passing distant ship.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 2, 2014

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Front View, 2014

Schenkelberg is less topical in her shipwreck, but her intention and process are as tenuous, just as obsessed. Julie Schenkelberg grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, surrounded by the beauty of decaying architecture, slate-gray skies, and rusted steel. Her relentless fascination is evident in her process of seeking out and curating distinct objects. Yes, these items are ubiquitous except these objects carry a history, these objects have souls. Scrap metal yards, thrift shops, estate sales, construction dumpsters, attics, and basements—her preparation is an active and continuous search. After gathering the appropriate materials she organizes by size, color, material, like a gigantic painter’s palette.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 5, 2014

It makes sense to prepare for something this grand. Becoming intimate with the materials, Schenkelberg understands their properties physically and unveils their spirit. When they are pulled from the palette, each component is sensitive to space, attuned to the unique surroundings at hand in the creation of a sublime work both beautiful and frightening. Gericult worked hard in the gathering, he used it in a realistic style, but ultimately he was after raw emotion. Schenkelberg’s emotion is palatable in the tactile. She creates moments of startling presence where everyday facts are magical, visual in our own memory.

Morton Hotel, Mezzanine Stairwell.

Morton Hotel, Mezzanine Stairwell.

To the front of the lobby, sweeping staircases with Art Deco railings lead to several mezzanine level spaces with balconies overlooking the ballroom like porticos from the heavens. Beneath the fading, elaborate, delicately frescoed ceilings, “Symptomatic Constant,” exquisite in its construction of reclaimed detritus, lies romantically shipwrecked on the dusty travertine marble floor. Here are two intersecting pyramids: a crumpled ground plane elegantly shifting in tone and a pyramid of architecture thrusting upward in a hull and a sail—uncertain and intensive. From this vantage, it was appropriate to watch as patrons, beneath the ruined sky of repeated arches, discover its evasive edges. “Symptomatic Constant” resonates on this scale, alluding to a work even more vast and disquieting. It reminds us that loss is profound and that the conclusion, though ethereal, is ultimately survival in the ascension.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/11/julie-schenkelberg-builds-shipwrecks-of-hope-symptomatic-constant/

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Bird’s-Eye View, 2014

Tim Powers: Below the Surface, by Robert Sparrow Jones: Michigan Quarterly Review, July, 2014

Michigan Artist, Tim Powers is an unabashed materialist whose work revels in minimalism, but he is not at all resistant to one metaphorical symbol, the pillow. In effect, “Tim Powers: Below the Surface” at the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, is a quiet meditation on the mundane and intimate space of sleep. His source of investigation is the philosophical and existential oppositions that manifest themselves in the industrial materials he uses. The theme of the unconscious is carried through in the ethereal hues inherent to polystyrene and latex that collectively invite the viewer into a meditative space. But what stirs this exhibit are the oppositions Powers designates in the details. They are full of physically engaging contradictions that lure you inside the work. And while dreams themselves remain nameless; a sustaining eternal question about what makes our own landscape lingers.















Powers grew up on the west side of Detroit until he was seven. He is the youngest of four. His father, Daniel Anthony Powers, a graduate of the University of Detroit was a mechanical engineer who designed and manufactured hardware. Along with acquiring several patents, Daniel became president of the thriving Precision Hardware, which manufactured panic and fire exit hardware for over half a century. Precision Hardware was situated along Fort Street near Del Ray, an area cut off from the rest of Detroit by a deeply industrial landscape: the River Rouge and Zug Island. Physically, the company was an amalgam of repurposed buildings they had purchased one after the other in a perfect row, including what was once the local meat market. Each building was referred to by its original owner’s name—Shimmle’s, Dewy’s—and each served a dedicated function of the company: a foundry, inventory, shipping warehouse, a churning machine shop. Tim would spend summers working in front of a drill press and a large bin of parts, manually clamping down and rote drilling. He ate his lunches on the asphalt as the air mixed with the toxins emitted from the Ford Rouge Complex and Wayne Soap—an industrial plant that rendered animal parts.

This geography is evident in “Below the Surface.” The menace of a deeply personal and historical landscape is sometimes right on the surface. There is nothing warm or billowy about these pillow forms. They are made from the cold, hard, and rubbery industrial materials that Powers experiments with. His pillow forms are molded from polystyrene, a material used for uniformity and mass production, into an illusion of softness by manipulating their shapes. Sometimes other materials are used, such as the polished concrete in, Untitled, 2011, concrete and the mix of latex in, Untitled, 2010, polystyrene, latex rubber. A few of pieces, with their insides emerging, are even more evocative.

Untitled, 2011, polystyrene, enameled wire, a white pillow form, is comprised of a bottom shell and top layer. The two forms have a silia-like membrane made up of enameled copper wire that peeks out around the seams between the two surfaces. Texture here suggests movement, magnified and slithering. One can imagine, just as sleep takes us, that the unconscious opens up to release memories. The invading detritus of the mundane becomes horrific. In another work, Untitled 2010, polystyrene, jacketed wire is a pillow form where the seams have opened on one side to reveal a gill-like texture. Because this hinted interior is made of white-coated enamel wire, the texture resembles sinew and offers a subtle, otherworldly breathing. It is inviting, sensual, and frightening.

Especially dramatic are the materials and effects of the pillow form, Untitled 2010, polystyrene, silicone caulk. Here the transparent plastic top layer reveals a spiny rolling landscape of white latex silicon spikes. Powers overtly seduces the viewer with the slickness and the association with the manufactured newness of the object. His contradictions are playful: hard and soft, light and dark. He then repels us with the reminder that here is a pillow. This is where we sleep when our childhood night terrors come back to us as dreams of water, submersion, and sci-fi horror.

Content is played the same way, pulling the seams open of cultural layers to infuse the medium with the realities of where we come from—through the lens of Powers’ own narrative:

“I have an awareness of the complex cooperative dynamics of a place. The factors that make up the unique characteristics of a particular place: the people, the climate, the industry, the culture and heritage, and the natural environment. These are in play in any “place” and are what becomes its personality. The more time there, the greater the awareness, if you are looking. Keen observation forms a connection that sits outside sentimentality. These observational details become the foundation of the emotional connection, the smell of a soap company or lacquer plant, the neon of a neighborhood bar, a draw bridge tower, the ever present litter that collects along a curb in a viaduct, cast iron street lamps, refinery tanks and two story clapboard homes separated by a potholed street.”

Is this personal landscape available to the viewer? I think so. Powers’ personal experience and relationship with his surrounding environment can not only be observed through the visible layers but also through his control and reconstructing of environment. Following the 1967 riots and the stabbing of a neighbor, the Powers family moved to rural Monore. Powers continued to be influenced by Detroit–his father commuted in daily to run Precision Hardware, and Tim worked there during summers and on Saturdays and later, as a part-time employee while he earned his undergraduate degree at the College of Creative Studies–but his work is shaped by the intersections between the rural Monroe and Detroit.

“In a way, the monumentality of Detroit taught me to look ‘up,’ and agrarian Monroe taught me to look ‘down.’ Both environments had a different, but equally wild nature. Each was full of texture, smells, subtle and dynamic colors and awesome vistas.”

“Below the Surface,” speaks to that experience of the diversity of place. I see a connection between identity and the industrial landscape. Powers evidences an unsentimental love for where he comes from rather than rebellion against it. This is where Powers is especially acute. By his devotion to a material and the development of a symbolic figure, he creates an atmosphere where a descent into the unconscious is a collective experience.

Untitled, 2013, polystyrene, provides a perfect example. A large grid of more than 400 somewhat organic white pillow forms takes up an entire wall and a corner of the exhibit. From a distance, the work appears minimal. They are stark white against the softer white of the actual wall. They resemble multiples, which would not be entirely off the mark. Every pillow form began when pulled from a wooden mold that Powers crafted. Then, however, he methodically made each one unique using a heat gun to create the curls, folds and wrinkles that stir the imagination. I like the contrast between appropriating a material used for uniformity and mass production–polystyrene is usually pulled around a mold tens of thousands of units over to create identical forms–and then tailoring the resulting forms.

Because Powers renders each pillow form distinctive, the near-repetition of the installation pieces does not create an impression of uniformity. Rather, it ignites a curiosity about each pillow’s personal identity. The illusion from a distance of movement encourages close examination, which results in deep struggle. You have to resist the temptation to run your fingers across the silky and satin surface of the folds. I imagine the downy insides, and the restlessness of each form takes us to an intimate, interior space: sleep, dreams and then excitement, passion, sleeplessness.

Albrecht Durer’s, pen and brown ink drawing, Six Studies of Pillows, 1493, comes to mind. Durer masterfully depicted folds and wrinkles to evidence the body, and he created adroit likenesses that keenly described life. Powers, however, purposely and less sharply, takes a three-dimensional form and creates a very different effect. Untitled, 2013, polystyrene evidences passive revelation of the act of sleep, lovemaking, violence, despair, and sleeplessness. Instead of rendering material into a representation of direct observation, Powers gives us something interior. The language of wrinkles is somewhat unclear. They are subtle in their shifts. As a symbol, they signify the interior, private experience. This telling mark points to the artist’s interest in materials. The movement and expression, unpredictable and somewhat orchestrated, awakens us to our collective folds of the unconscious.



A final note: before the entrance to the exhibit a molten metal artifact is displayed. It evokes a certain intimacy, resembling something animal, the residue of life lived. Powers notes that he wanted to include this piece because although he didn’t make it himself, it provides context for the items he did make. It is one of many artifacts collected from the floor of Precision Hardware by his late father.

“It broadens the definition of what is art and what constitutes a body of work. It is an item I had no control of its creation, yet supplements the discussion of those that I did. I think the interpretive nature of its form provides an access point for the viewer on a basic level, and also supports my relationship to the specific process I experienced with my new work. It went through a similarly transformative process the polystyrene went through, going from rigid, to pliable, to rigid again and changing form in each step. Like many materials it holds limitless potential forms that lie latent in its current form. It is a state that is only momentarily static. That moment ranging from minutes to eons, but it will change again. It was originally not my thought to realty this to the landscape, but it is certainly an obvious parallel.”

With “Below the Surface,” Tim Powers’ expert capabilities as a maker result in a deeply industrial landscape. Inherent to his materials are the playful subversions possible because of our associations with closeness and escape. We all harbor deep internal landscapes. They are expressed as an amalgam of memories, sweet and dark as entanglements of fossilized metal.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/07/tim-powers-below-the-surface/