statement

I'm a liar. I believe in what I try to say, though the words I write, they evade me. They slip and slide around in time and space between the random coordinates of what is known, unknown, and unknowable. Words can be the most valuable and helpless tools full of challenges, disappointments and subtle rewards just waiting to be swept away. Alas, the statement, yes, the statement by an artist seems to be an attempt to reconcile contradictions that cannot be rationalized. It's as hopeful in gaining value and meaning as the irrational object it's trying to describe.

This particular drawing series harvests words from journals. The words written down, once unique in shape and concept, slowly began to resemble routine marks and familiar meanings until the actual shape of the word morphed into an 'ink scratch'. The ink scratch represents the word as a tool to conceptualize 'things'. Words typically describe known and unknown things; and in this case, perhaps, the ink scratches attempt to illustrate the unknowable. And though the unknowable cannot be known, I'm still curious about it... but not in any rush. The mark-making application is slow, using a metal pen nib and ink well, in hopes that the unknowable may magically materialize… there's always hope. Each pen nib performs differently and has a varying lifespan until gravity and pressures wear down its metal body, and the ink bleeds profusely to the paper.

Up close, these descriptive-tools, formerly known as words, lie in piles that turn into columns, which then form mazes and diagrams of unintelligible networks or language maps on vellum construction plans. From afar, the forms resemble energetic fields or masses of phantom matter and appendages. In this temporal space, words are evasive, and they provide raw material for scribbling on paper and building remote-controlled rose colored drones.

bio

born: 1979, Redwood City, Califorina

education

Brooklyn College, MFA candidate, 2017
City College of San Francisco, Post Baccalaureate, 2012-2013
San Francisco State University, BA, 2010

selected awards/honors

Full scholarship recipient, 11th Annual California Sculptors Symposium, 2013

selected publications

OtherPeoplesPixels Blog, "OtherPeoplesPixels Interviews Benjamin Lyon", interview conducted by Stacia Yeapanis, Chicago, Illinois, 2013, http://blog.otherpeoplespixels.com/otherpeoplespixels-interviews-benjamin-lyon

selected solo or two-person exhibits

City College Art Gallery, Echo In the Thicket, San Francisco, California, 2015

selected group shows

Cal State University East Bay, Emerging Artists, Hayward, California, 2013
City College of San Francisco, Education Is Liberation, San Francisco, California, 2013
Fort Mason: 38th Annual Holiday Exhibition, San Francisco, California, 2012
City College of San Francisco, Accredidate This, San Francisco, California, 2012