“that which enables and constrains what can and cannot be done or said”
Benjamin Woods
21 Aug → 26 Sept 2015
In the video clip for the song Alarm Call, Björk and Alexander McQueen present a raft as a surface with which a person experiences a vast spectrum of sensations travelling along a river thick with life. The raft provides an example of an object that intensifies both what it constrains (water, piranhas, drowning, swimming, death) and what it enables (mixtures of fear, connection, pleasure, ecstasy, pain, fierceness, joy, curiosity, friendship). In art practice, I think a lot of the time I’m striving to see this “raft,” made up of mixtures of intensities – whether it takes the form of a conversation, an installation, a song, or a pair of shoes.
This exhibition explores relations between what is possible and what is impossible for my practice. By extracting from past work, new activities will be unfurled to open up other ways of observation/sensation. The material arrangements of the exhibition will emerge according to their ability to effectively bring about movement, change, attention to chance and intense particularity.
EXAMPLE ACTION SESSIONS:
Saturday 29th August, 2-3pm
Saturday 5th September, 2-3pm
Benjamin Woods engages practice across sculptural, spatial and movement processes, touching on and responding to many forces. They are interested in how art practice can be considered open, often focusing on the simultaneously indeterminate and particular happenings of materiality, perception, force-relations and embodiment. Their practice becomes public through improvisations, actions, sculptural objects, installations, images, sounds and writings.