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Benjamin Mason, Sacred Work, digital pinhole photograph, 2023

Sacred Work by Benjamin Mason

on the board from February 10th- April 10th,  2023

Benjamin Mason is an artist and writer who grew up in St. Paul, MN, and has been residing on the East Side for 15 years. Active in the local arts community on Saint Paul's East Side, he is the co-director of Art in the Hollow, serves on the advisory team for the Solidarity Street Gallery, and recently held a solo exhibition of his pinhole photography at Art @967 Payne. His novel, The Masque and the Dagger was published by Mill City Press in 2011.

 

I stumbled into pinhole photography while trying to decide how to generate images for a novel I was publishing, The Masque and the Dagger. I learned I could use a camera’s body cap, a drill, a pin, some foam, and a can of Cherry Coke to create a pinhole lens for my digital camera. Pinhole photography has become one of my favorite ways to look more closely at the world. The photographs have an unruly energy and have the ability to capture the motion and vibe of a scene in a way that traditional photography does not usually accomplish.

 

Sacred Work showcases the big windows that allow light to flow into the old church at Case and Edgerton streets from the east, with silhouettes demonstrating activities of recreating the interior space and imagining new art. I wanted the photograph to capture the motion involved in converting the space from one form of sacred to another: from the spiritual to the creative. The scene is also partly inspired by the church and artistic imagery of R.E.M.'s seminal video for Losing my Religion. R.E.M.'s first rehearsal space was, in fact, a converted old church in Athens, GA.

 

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Exhibition Statement

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The painter Scott Seebart and I have been traveling to Venice, Florence and Rome and surrounding cities for over 20 years and for the past 10 years have spent almost every summer and many Winter breaks working from the ornate fusion of visual archetype and artistic innovation that is the core of the Italian Renaissance. 2 summers ago, rather than staying in the cacophonous center of Florence or Rome, we rented a farmhouse on a mountain just outside of Citta di Castello located in the center of a collection of works, in situ, of Piero della Francesco which became the destination for day-trips, breaking the solitude of the ruins of the medieval town of Pietrolo where our farmhouse stood, isolated, the only renovated structure on a wild mountain that is home to screaming chiungale and an abundance of tadpoles as the trickle of fresh mountain water from our well pooled into a river that eventually joined the Tiber. Rather than the picturesque patchwork of distant multi-colored fields that decorate the mountains moving away in a blue haze of atmospheric perspective, it was the house itself that became the landscape that I studied, nestled inside of a forest alcove that hid the huge sky, the gnarled tree trunks and shifting beams of light, the walkways, the kitchen, the fireplace and the garden became a collection of shifting planes that confused scale and responded to composition through the touch of the painters hand and the direct physicality of an image in flux. At the same time, the works of Piero were a constant reminder of an image that serves geometry, slowly building a network of carefully balanced relationships. Creating an indirect image that hides its process. I developed a series of portraits that sought to slow the viewer down and to erase the hierarchy of mark-making, leaving a from that creates its own conventions of light.

 

This summer was especially influential for my work, as I transitioned from the use of the Italian facade as a lexicon that I understood only though a series of academic studies to the integration of its influence with my own use of allegory and form. I am honored to be included on this exhibition with a group of such amazing and serious painters who I have looked to as examples of excellence, invention, rigor and a subversive commitment to the act of looking.

 

July 4th, 2012

Jessie Fisher

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